In the second half of 1978, Sándor Bernáth/y was feverishly preparing for the 20th anniversary exhibition of the Studio of Young Artists. His excitement was heightened by several factors: it was the first time he could take part in the Studio’s annual exhibition, which he considered highly prestigious; he had never exhibited at such a distinguished venue as the Hungarian National Gallery; and the new type of call for entries for the jubilee—in which participating artists could arrange their own “box” or delimited space—was particularly inspiring to him.
His participation was nearly banned before the opening: the organizers saw only that he had piled all sorts of things into his allotted space and then covered it with a cloth, so they could not imagine what it would turn out to be. In the end, in his box entitled Társasutazás – egyhelyben (“Group Travel – In One Place”), he presented a range of works created with different techniques. The installation included three self-portraits drawn on black paper against a black background—depicting himself as a child, a teenager, and his present self at the time—as well as his photo series Accidental Diamontages, which the audience could view on a Kodak Carousel projector. The series was created by superimposing two rolls of film: the first taken in Leninváros at the Experimental Workshop (with some fellow artists recognizable in the images), the second in Tatabánya, at his friend Viktor Lois’s place, where he captured almost lunar landscapes. Also part of the installation was a glass piece made in Leninváros and, reflecting on the title, he scattered the space with used tram tickets. He also played with light: he set up the lighting so that the lamp would occasionally switch on, alternately revealing either the exhibited objects or the projected images.
The negative version of Accidental Diamontages, first shown at the Studio exhibition, was submitted in early 1979 to the Salon international de la recherche photographique in Royan, France. At that time, he was mainly experimenting with black-and-white photo sequences, long-exposure shots, wide-angle lenses, and various experimental procedures, often reworking his images further in the darkroom. This body of work remains largely unexplored to this day. His most successful works appeared in 1977 as photo supplements in several issues of the weekly paper Élet és Irodalom.
Zombori Mónika: Bernáth/y Sándor, Neon Gallery, Budapest, 2012 (revised excerpt)