Hungary is also affected by the impacts of climate change, a process that has become very concentrated in Hungary in the summer of 2022. The country was hit by a drought unprecedented in living memory: the Great Plain became a kind of hell. But the disaster has been going on for decades.
The photographs show the Danube-Tisza sandflats, declared semi-desert by the UN’s World Food Organisation in 2004. Although most of the pictures were taken in 2022, Váradi became interested in the subject as early as the end of the first decade of the 2000s. He felt the crisis first hand, as it was the place where he grew up as a child and young adult, where the changes that had been taking place slowly, almost undetectably, for years were almost visible.
It is impossible to escape this crisis, we are all up to our necks in it. Yet the images in the exhibition space are made much deeper and more layered by the fact that they were taken by a voyeur with a personal embeddedness in the area, who was not wandering and contemplating under the arcades of the big city, but in a disaster-stricken area that was changing character for good.
Balázs Zoltán Tóth