Exercises in Letting Go - Esterházy Art Award Shortlist, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest
The theme of the project is building a personal archive of family documents found in the legacy of my grandfather, Béla Czene. Through the process of conserving and understanding I am trying to let go of family traumas, personal experiences, and the artist role my family, an artist family of several generations, dictates. I attempt to analyze the effects the image of women, originating from the oeuvre of my grandfather, a known nude painter of the socialist era, has made on my identity, my teenage body image, and artistic practice. I will also attempt to contextualize his nude painting from a personal and a female point of view and contrast this with the life the female members of my family actually lived.
My works consist of stills compiled into multi-layered tableaus. The arrangement of the scenes was inspired by Kuleshov’s and Eisenstein’s montage theories, where the story often evolves only through the details assembled next to one another in a montage. The obscurity generated by using different media and techniques next to one another, and layers partly covering each other, refers to memories that are no longer accessible.
