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The current simultaneous political, social and environmental catastrophes reinforce each other, resulting in an absurd normalisation at both individual and collective levels. Disintegration manifests everywhere: alienation from nature, from each other, from science, religion, ethics, and tradition reached unprecedented depths. The suicidal karma of the individual and society is accepted with poignant surrender. With deliberate apathy, we are moving toward the fatal events. We even aestheticise it, reveling in the collapse. It could be called the age of stupidity. This is the Zeitgeist. Or more like Zeitgeistlosigkeit.

Hajnal Szolga explores these absurd, existential, and ethical dilemmas in her works. While in Traces of Survival, Scotopia and Melt, the passive bystander figure of the survivor appears, Bunker and No Fear are narrative scenographies without characters. There's action, no actor, no one to identify with, but no one to blame either... at least not in the pictures. If Allen Feldman was right that "the event is not what happened, but what can be told as a story," this is the story of late-capitalist convenience logic. An ambivalent tale caught between servitude and vulnerability.
These series are documentations of the past, defining images of contemporary collective consciousness, and also scenarios for the future. The absence of actors invites viewers to identify with the passive perpetrator and active victim.

The emotional turmoil is conveyed beyond the images of a destroyed nature through the material. As the artist applies chemigram and photogram methods, the development process becomes a stretch of intention and coincidence: a different result is obtained if the reaction is interrupted. The experimental method paraphrases the exhibition's dilemma: what if we did something?

Hajnal Szolga, a Berlin-based photographer, presents her first solo exhibition in Hungary, showing her work from the last three years.

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The material in Géza Seres' exhibition is a combination of 21st century and archaic tools. His themes are the enclosures that surround us, into which we build and tread the patterns that archaeologists of future ages can analyse as fossilised artefacts. The process itself is reminiscent of archaeological work: at one point in the process of making an anthracotype, the surface of the image covered with dust (bone charcoal, charcoal or lamp dust) must be cleaned of 'excess' material to produce a clear image.

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When I started to engage with photography more deeply, it was mainly in the documentary movement that I discovered realism in photography. However, I realised that reality is chaotic, the world around us is disorderly, and many noises and distractions interfere with the creation of images. Even though I try to expose at the best angle and moment, when the shutter of the camera opens, all the hidden and visible, wanted and unwanted elements of reality are captured in the image. Later, as I’m looking at the photograph, I feel that natural or physical phenomena or simply chance have created a disturbance in the image that destroys it.

Unlike photography, painting is the product of the artist's subjective ideas and thoughts. The subject matter, composition and colour of a painting are chosen by the artist to interpret their thoughts and emotions. In the studio, the painter can control the creative process more easily. On the other hand, when taking photographs, real life always leads me by the nose.

It is common in contemporary photographic practice to manipulate digitally produced photography with digital tools. The aim is to achieve a "painting-like" effect, but this is only a technology and does not lend the photograph any uniqueness.

I am a painter by training, with a degree in painting. During my artistic studies I became acquainted with aesthetic and compositional problems. I have become well versed in colour theory, spatial perception and the construction of the image. Armed with this kind of artistic vision, I began to photograph. I was mainly interested in how to make a photograph unique, what means I could use as a painter to reinterpret and highlight the subject of a photograph. Colours and colouring gave me the answer. But I didn't want to make a colour photo using a physico-chemical or digital process, but to interpret the subject of the photos by subjective colouring. So in recent years I have experimented with different forms of painting on my photographs. I have either painted directly onto the prints of the images, as photographers did a hundred years ago, or I have covered them with thick oil paint and kept only a few highlighted elements of the image. I also experimented with printing the photographs on paper and canvas. I try to speak a visual language that allows the painting techniques to blend with the photographic. Through the use of colour and highlighting, I aim to preserve the documentary value of the photograph as a subjective interpretation of reality.

In this exhibition I display my experiments, a combination of my photographic and painting work. My works are both photographs and paintings - I call these attempts photographic painting.

This exhibition is supported by the National Cultural Fund.

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Completed in 2021, the photo series, Space is Balázs Deim’s latest work. The project, which connects the realms of perception, imagination and personal memories, re-evaluates everyday objects and places in such a way that they appear as evidence of space travels. At the same time, it does not hide the signs of everydayness and the original functions of the objects. This way, the images of space that are created with simple objects are re-contextualized as the documentation of a private, internal journey.

The project combines the notion of játék (playing, game, toy) with the phenomena of nostalgia and wanderlust. The images activate multiple interpretative layers of the concept ranging from toys, the act of playing and the child’s universe to the creative process of experimentation, which is highly characteristic of Balázs Deim’s works. The photos point towards the future as they probe infinity with the curiosity of a child who has become aware of the universe and the ceaseless desire to discover the unknown. They are also a nostalgic evocation of the past, whence moments and places of childhood, deeply buried in the subconscious, emerge. These include the real or imagined memory of a playground, an image from an old magazine, and a Cold War era newsreel. Some of the pictures serve as a tribute to photographers who influenced Balázs Deim’s outlook.

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With his first solo show at Mai Manó House and at an arts institution, photographer Zoltán Tombor offers a comprehensive overview of his work in recent years. It was in November 2019 that the artist moved back from New York City, where he had lived and worked since 2011. Known for twenty years as a fashion photographer, he is now featured at the exhibition, Light Therapy as an autonomous creator.

On the first floor, we present a selection from the series that was inspired by the year 2020. While creating this original material, the artist examined such feelings as isolation, confinement and uncertainty, studied the effects of lacking a vision of the future and often conflicting emotions. He cannot, nor does he wish to, offer answers or solutions to his questions: what are the things in our current lives that we can do without, and what is irreplaceable? What are the things in this new situation that have real value? The series is a quiet meditation, occasioned by the unexpected episode that was 2020, with the artist looking for himself in the upheaval.

Presented on the second floor is a selection from five years of editorial work, made mostly in New York City. This material reveals a salient connection between Tombor’s applied and original art. The images in this selection were published in prestigious magazines, like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Time, The New York Times Style, and The Last Magazine, with such celebrities among the models as Shirin Neshat, Alicia Keys and Francesco Clemente.

Zoltán Tombor (1973) lives and works in Budapest. A self-taught photographer, he learnt the essentials in his teens, and has been a professional since 1995. Starting his career in Hungary, in 2003 he moved to Milan, working mostly on fashion, advertising and portrait commissions. In 2011 he relocated to New York City, photographing fashion for major magazines. In 2015 he launched his own annual publication, Supernation, which features his fashion and documentarian series. He is a member of the Association of Hungarian Photographers, the Hungarian Press Association, the International Center of Photography, New York, and the Professional Photographers of America. His most recent exhibition in Hungary, Homeward, was on view at Societé Budapest in 2019.

Open to the public:
31 August 2021, 6pm. – 3 October 2021
Tuesday - Sunday 12:00 – 19:00.
Closed on Mondays and public holidays.
Curator: Zita Sárvári

As it opens its joint gallery with the Studio of Young Photographers, the  Association of Hungarian Photographers (est. 1956) answers a long-felt need for an exhibition space that is dedicated to its members.

Synopsis, the gallery’s first exhibition selects works from the first decade of the Studio of Young Photographers, which the Association established in 1977 and has maintained ever since. The first-generation creators of the Studio who are featured at the display are by now multi-award-winning artists of the Association, key figures of Hungarian contemporary photography. The exhibiting artists are Sándor Apáti-Tóth, András Balla, András Bánkuti, Imre Benkő, Gábor Fejér, Péter Horváth, Antal Jokesz, Ferenc Kanyó, Gábor Kerekes, György Stalter, János Szerencsés, László Tasnádi, Péter Tímár, György Tóth, Attila Vécsy, and Magdolna Vékás.

Curators: Péter Baki and Viktória Balogh

For more than a decade, photographer Lenke Szilágyi (who has also been working as a photo-archivist in the Archives for a number of years) has regularly traveled to the (former) Soviet Union, witnessing and documenting the fall of Communism and Post-Soviet realities not only in large centers like Moscow or St. Petersburg but also in the provinces (the Black Sea coast, the Volga region, Karelia, etc.). Her photos are sensitive imprints of an era of constant change and territory of eternal immutability. She depicts in her portraits the hopes and despairs of the time, while also adding her own witty commentaries in the diary entries accompanying the photos. This exhibition is the first major presentation of this collection.

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Lenke Szilágyi started her career as a documentarian of the Budapest underground in the 1980s: her unique portraits of legendary literary figures, artists, actors, filmmakers, musicians, and members of the democratic opposition and her sensitive photos of the everyday life of this scene made her one of the most important photographers of the period. In the mid-1980s, she began her travels all over the world; it was in 1990 that she first travelled to Moscow, on an assignment for the samizdat journal Beszélő to cover the Helsinki Conference. But she also documented a city that was at the time still the capital of the Soviet Union, which collapsed a year later.

   A year later, she spent four months in the crumbling country in the company of a Hungarian Bulgakov-scholar and his friends. They stayed in Sukhumi on the Black Sea coast, also travelling to conferences in St. Petersburg, Samara or Kyiv. She spent the last month of this sojourn on a voyage down the Volga and on the Black Sea. The photos she took during her voyage, again, focus more on the people and their immediate surroundings than on the sea or the majestic river with its colorful autumn landscapes.

   In 1993, the Georgian-Abkhazian war prevented Szilágyi and her friends from returning to Sukhumi, so they spent one month on the Russian coast of the Black Sea, in Gelendzhik, from where they travelled to the Crimea (then part of Ukraine), to St. Petersburg, and to Lake Ladoga in Karelia. Her lyrical reports (and the diary she kept during this journey) reflect her deep understanding of country life and of the local people, whether in sunny Crimea or in cold, northern Karelia. This sensitivity emerges clearly in her portraits of smoking youngsters or resting old women, too.

Szilágyi returned in 1996 to war-torn Sukhumi (under adventurous circumstances: using a fake passport), finding burnt-down houses, and hardly any of her former friends in the once charming city. In the following years she regularly traveled to Russia: she took a trip to Lake Baykal and Irkutsk in 2001 and spent a couple of weeks on the beach at Blagoveshchenskaya on the Black Sea in 2002. Wherever she went, she took photos that, to quote art critic András Bán, are “unique, and do not tolerate captions or comments… they are meaningful in themselves as if floating... ” Their compositional wit and sometimes their sheer strangeness capture the spontaneity of street scenes

Her scenes capture the peculiarities of the post-soviet era with a great sense of composition, light, and environment, showing a remarkable ability to communicate both humor and tragedy. The exhibition brings together photographs in both black and white and color, many of which were processed and developed by the artist herself at the time.

Curator: Katalin Székely