Liza Szabó’s exhibition is an attempt to process, understand and narrate in the language of images an intimate partner sexual violence that happened seventeen years ago. An attempt to reconstruct and reveal the often imperceptible, hidden effects and traces of the loss of control over one’s own body and soul, of powerlessness, and of the perhaps brief but total loss of freedom.
It is understandable and incomprehensible at the same time why, in lots of cases, it is only after many years that a traumatic event emerges from memory and demands confrontation and the subsequent articulation of what exactly happened.
The psychological trauma can be so great, so shocking, so inexplicable, so incongruous to the fabric of everyday life and thinking, that the very interest of survival is to suppress and cut it off quickly. In such a case, in the place of repression, in the history of the Self and of the soul, a blank spot, an empty space emerges, a rupture that cannot be spoken of, that is not there, but is there as the lack of continuity.
Liza Szabó’s exhibition tries to look into the depths of this gap, of this rupture, with its own means, with images, with the articulation of the verbally inexpressible. Knowing that the work is incomplete and unfinishable. The opening of the wounds of the soul, the emergence of memory traces are unconscious processes, that might be easily triggered by the memory or the impression of a place, an object, an image, or a sound.
However, since the Self can be understood as a process that is constantly changing over time, rather than as a static entity that is not changing over time, the interpretation of memories and images also changes, gets into a new context, and deepens. It never comes to a rest. There is perpetual readiness and attention, a never-ending confrontation with ourselves, our memories, our images, our abyss.
There is no rest.