Ala i Ola

Performance date: 22 January 2026 in Brighton, UK

Performers: Ola and Alicja Teper

Concept: Ola Teper

Music: Alicja Teper

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Ala i Ola is a photogram produced during a performance in a colour darkroom by two identical twin sisters Ala and Ola Teper. The structure of the meeting was simple: to work in the complete darkness for as long as the roll of paper lasted. As they spontaneously pressed their hands and feet into the paper for two hours, this experiment turned into a negotiation of movement and intention between two people. Without being able to see, every shift in position had to be proposed, sensed and agreed in real time. The darkroom provided a condition where they had to find and navigate each other through touch and voice, testing what the other was doing and how to respond.

 

Central to this work is repetition: as identical twins, there is an assumption that mirroring each other should be instinctive. The piece instead shows how much ongoing negotiation that closeness requires. Returning over again to the same gestures and trying to align movements, the result is a series of near-misses and a tension between similarities and differences. In this sense, cameraless processes are particularly apt to explore this tension as the absence of the negative removes the fixed position of the subject frozen by camera’s shutter. In the photogram, any attempts at alignment produce inevitable mismatches.

 

The work also reflects sister’s broader biography as adults whose lives is structured by migration and separation. It tests how much the geographical and circumstantial distance affected the inherent proximity of their selves. In the dark they relied on touch to find each other, a sense that collapses any physical gap. Touch is also a distinctive language of childhood, one that gradually falls out of frequency as we grow up. It is a different way of relating to each other and to the photographic materials. This work makes explicit the closeness between sisters which can be still located in the physical body through a playful negotiation.