The photography exhibition shows works by three young Hungarian photographers who seek to investigate how their worldview is being revealed in the face of family dynamics, close friendships and everyday life observations. How do relationships to other people, the past and a present that once again is marked by uncertainty, shape aspirations for the future? The way each of these projects is intimately personal and rooted in the past and present simultaneously, is quite revealing not only of an experienced unpredictability, but also the confident creative expression regarding the search of one’s own story. The anxieties and insecurities that structure everyday life in post-communist countries thus becoming a conscious narrative tool to reflect on one’s intimate surroundings. 

Francisca Legát (*1997, Budapest)
[web] [IG]

Legát embellishes images from her family archive with playful patterns, blurring the distinction between what is remembered and what has been narrated, stitching together the lost pieces of individual memory and family history. The question “What was the Hungary my parents grew up in like?” is allegorical of Legát’s quest for identity through the scattered memories of her parents. Some of the photographs are derived from real-life events as narrated by her parents, others are based on the author’s perceptions and associations, so that the resulting images are a mixture of classic formal motifs fused with contemporary visual language.

Domonkos Varga (*1998, Budapest)
[web] [IG]

In his work, Domonkos is addressing contemporary issues like consumption, industry, ideology, body and transformation. He uses metaphors and symbolic images that are poetically composed in fragments. In the series “Acts of Cassandra” (the title refers to Cassandra, a fortune teller in Greek mythology), he explores how utopias and dystopian ideologies relate to technological and social change. His installation functions like an imaginary mind-map, juxtaposing trivial fears and expectations of a new world with the problems of society.

Boglárka Éva Zellei (*1993, Budapest)
[web] [IG]

In most of her work, Zellei dissects and meditates on the topic of religion from a personal, intimate space of retrospection, which allows her to play with her distance to the subject. Engaging with a range of genres: portraiture, landscape and still life, she subverts rigid ideas about religion both by those who are skeptic of its role in modern affairs or those who attempt to weaponize belief as a political tool for manipulation. Notions of purification or sacrifice manifest as performative processes, visual explorations of religious imagery and quietly invoke the materialization of various identities, which live on as subtle suggestions by the artist.

Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe / Berlin.   With the kind support of Collegium Hungaricum Berlin.