The Molnár Ani Gallery’s fall exhibition program continues with Veronika Csonka’s solo exhibition titled *What has been here all along*. The exhibition takes observation as its starting point — as a creative practice — in which the artist explores the ways in which we can connect with nature and the living systems around us in a way of life increasingly defined by the urban environment, technology, and indirect experience.
The desire for closeness to nature is a familiar experience for many, yet the workings of the natural environment often remain distant and difficult to perceive. We tend to view plants, bodies of water, and other living systems as a uniform backdrop, without paying attention to the minute, often invisible processes and interactions that are constantly taking place within them. Veronika Csonka is not seeking the possibility of a romantic return to nature; rather, in her works, she explores how new relationships can be forged with the living systems of which we ourselves are a part.
One of the personal starting points for the exhibition is the artist’s family garden in Zamárdi, which has been part of his life for generations. While the garden was previously primarily a place for daily subsistence and care, for Csonka it has become a space of memory and an important point of connection to nature. This inspired the creation of a sensor-based object that recorded various natural processes and was operational in the garden in the period leading up to the exhibition. The built-in sensors monitored and recorded various environmental parameters, thereby making perceptible processes that usually remain invisible to everyday observation. In this case, technology is not a substitute for the experience of nature, but rather an extension of our attention, attempting to transform a physically distant place into a constantly changing system before our very eyes.
This approach to technology defines the exhibition as a whole. Microscopic images, specimens, biological structures, measurement data, and slow biochemical processes are not presented as scientific illustrations, but rather as starting points through which various ways of observing nature become tangible. The paintings and objects are partly based on the artist’s microscopic observations, which are reflected in her use of materials evocative of laboratory environments, cross-sections, and specimens. The abstract, organic forms appearing on the canvases evoke a sense of both the familiar and the alien, in which beauty and strangeness, order and decay are equally present.
At the same time, our connection to nature is not limited to scientific or technological tools. Observing a closed ecosystem, tending to plants, or even the biological processes taking place in the kitchen are all everyday situations in which humans are not merely observers but active participants in living systems. Direct experience and technological tools thus offer different ways for us to get closer to the processes unfolding around us. At the same time, the question arises as to how our relationship to something changes when we begin to perceive structures within it that were previously invisible.
The exhibition titled *What has been here all along* does not focus on the question of defining nature; rather, it highlights the tools we use to try to understand nature and how observation itself shapes our relationship with it. The exhibition traces the stages of the artist’s own attempts to reconnect, while also offering viewers the opportunity to get closer to the systems that surround us. Through her works, Veronika Csonka does not propose a return to a lost, idealized nature, but rather the realization that the possibility of this connection may never have completely disappeared — we simply need to learn to notice what has always been there.