Ajánljuk ezt a cikket, ami elolvasható a megjelenés oldalán
Good art, good photography, asks questions. It can force the viewer to reconsider their point of view. In that way, good art can work like a good question. If someone asks you a really good question, it surprises you and it forces you to think twice, before you are able give an answer. That does not mean that good art is about ‘raising questions and not giving any answers’ or that all good art merely asks questions. On the contrary, in my opinion, art and artists that take a clear point of view, or standpoint allows me to take a position, they kind of force me to agree or to disagree to their opinion. And while thus being forced to choose my position, I reconsider, contemplate, and indeed, I ask myself questions. And with that, we are back where we started: good art asks, or better, instigates questions. This exhibition, the second of the MOME Photography Master Program Diploma 2024, deals with, according to the introduction text with “artworks that often include questions of identity – life stories affected by internal and external influences – and memory – the chronographies that emerge from personal stories – as well as global issues affecting humanity as a whole.”
But one element of these three, between identity, memory and global issues seems to me to be the common denominator in this selection of artists and their works. And that is, to me, identity. Photography seems to be an obvious medium to address identity: a photograph taken by a human actor is a reflection of how that person sees, experiences, observes, understands the world. A photograph, taken 1by a human actor, is always personal. Unlike speed cameras, CCTV, or other mechanical photographic actors, a human actor will only photograph what they find noteworthy, remarkable, worth keeping, worth remembering. How explicit that action of taking a photograph is, how much thinking, responsibility, accountability goes into the taking, the selecting, editing, sequencing, using, and eventually circulating that image is another matter, though. I hope to believe that in our teachings at MOME these are things we can go into, that we aim to improve the thinking, the responsibility and accountability with our students. With these photographers, all graduates of an MA program, we may assume that they have put in the thinking and that they have taken the responsibility and accountability of their work that is now here on show, at this exhibition. They know what they photographed and why they photographed and are presenting it in the way that it is now shown. They are explicitly presenting their points of view, they present us with their viewpoint of the world, and through that they show us a part of their identity.
More so, the photographers use their projects to explore their own and other’s identity. So we have Lola Eördögh’s project My good people, my God’s people. She invokes the memories from her childhood, recreates them in astonishing photographic plates, monumental representations from the past, to perhaps come to terms with this history. In her own words: her history has a strong influence on how she 2relates to people, her vision of life, and thus: her whole personality. Not through memory but through stereotypes is how Anita Horváth explores her identity. By collecting stereotypes from conversations and talks about the gypsy community, and by photographically exploring what it means for her to be a Gypsy she came to realise that identity is a multi-layered phenomenon, and this project should be seen as a reflection of what it means to be a Gyspy woman. Also dealing with stereotypes, but in a different manner is Mari Ornella’s project “Through hardship to the stars.” She questions the stereotypical male gaze on the female: by reproducing this gaze in her work, by showing how female terminology used to describe our planet such as mother earth, a virgin forest, only reaffirms a male-centred view of the universe. Mari Ornella thus touches upon something beyond her own identity, namely modernity and perhaps even that we are now in a new face of modernity, called the Anthropocene, a time when the human influence on our surroundings is so large that our surroundings can no longer sustain our continued existence. This is exactly what I think Gergely Kovács is addressing in his project Another World. Is he addressing us, or rather himself when he says “It seems all in vain, when fantasy and the real world merge in the self- fulfilling prophecies of our dystopias.”
An existential crisis is also what Patricia Koroknai deals with in her highly personal body of work that confronts the meaninglessness of our lives. But, is she addressing herself with this project, or is she forcing us to confront the Anthropocene reality that both Kovács and Ornella serve us? Somehow, Franciska Anna Legát offers us a kind of solace in her “Melancholy of Freedom”. People choosing a new country of residence due to the ever- shrinking space for freedom at home. Indeed, it may be read as a political statement on Hungarian politics, or as a reminder that only when we step out of our comfort zone and are willing to confront our selves in new surroundings, we may learn something about our own identity.
Thank you very much.
Marc Prüst
September 2024
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