If You Knew It, Why Didn’t You Do Something About It?

18. October 2024. – 22. November
MegnyitóOpening: October 17, 2024, 6:00 pm
MegnyitjaRemarks by: Kristina McLean

The show exposes the absurdity — and heartbreak — of raising children in a time of imminent climate disaster, global conflicts, and crises through spontaneous and irreverent humour.

Following her widely acclaimed photobook „Sorry I Disappeared I Gave Birth But Now I’m Back,” Gáldi Vinkó continues to probe the demands of parenthood, teaming up this time with fellow artist and friend Hin and her 6-year-old daughter Dana to create a new body of mixed media works incorporating photographs, drawing, painting, and texts.

The deeply personal, poignant series explores multiple converging perspectives and responses to the climate emergency and visions of the future, capturing the exchanges between a mother and a child. The purity of a child’s drawing and the appearance of graffiti and scribble together with the glued-on collages give these works an immense tension, as if Gáldi already accepted the fact that her imagined world, which are her original photographs, are nothing but illusions.

Hin, with his childlike doodles and provocative humour, responds from the perspective of a non-parent, free from the weight of future generations. Together, their work becomes a haunting conversation about climate disaster, societal apathy, and what it means to laugh at the very thing that’s swallowing us whole. It also questions the shifting role of photographs in a rapid, intrusive news cycle and the ways it collides with and contradicts a parent’s attempts to create a sense of safety and security in the domestic realm.

The dilemma of whether to have children in a world on fire isn’t just a personal struggle — it’s a reflection of our collective crisis. How do you create life knowing it’s heading into possible chaos?