“Impulse,” 2011, Natasha de Betak’s latest series of photographs, elicits a surreal string of adjectives: foggy, luminous, somnambulant, amoebic, and sublime, to pinpoint a few. Thirty-six digital prints, smudged and out of focus, are hung in seemingly arbitrary clusters, just as the subjects range from a vacant bed in a psychiatric ward to a droplet of water suspended midair to a naked man and a distant, unnamed landscape. De Betak utilizes a macro lens, zooming in, defying scale; here a molecule looks like a moon. The most intriguing works on view are the two that confront time directly: a worn-out clock marking, precisely, 1:23; a speedometer measuring time relatively—SLOW, STOP, FAST. These paranoid needles seem to cast a shadow over the entire room.

A timeless locationlessness permeates de Betak’s own gypsy life: Born in Madrid to an Argentinean father and a French-Polish Jewish mother, and having lived in Budapest, New York, and Moscow, she currently lives in Paris. Much like the art of travel, her subjects seem simultaneously in motion and frozen. Logic is, in the spirit of nomadism, bartered—for chaos. The photographs are shot in diverse formats, with multiple shutter speeds. Some are video stills, others static; some are taken outside, others inside; some are black-and-white, others in color; some tranquil, others hysterical. Even in its dualities, the series is uncannily consistent in telling a story of the disorderliness of the human psyche through a physical world that attempts to impose a system on it.

De Betak continues her exploration of interior states of mind in a second series of thirty-five prints, titled “Nightshade,” 2011. The archival prints on matte paper emerge more as paintings, framing anonymous people asleep in Kolkata, Varanasi, and Mumbai. The words MY MISSION IS TO KILL TIME, AND TIME’S TO KILL ME, IN ITS TURN are pasted in black vinyl on a black wall, revealing themselves only barely, like the photographs do to the viewer, as if they too were in between death and dream-life. The line reflects the morguelike atmosphere of the gallery, its reflexivity reaffirming the symbiotic—or parasitical—relationship between the physical world and the inner self.

— Himali Singh Soin