In her analog and digital works, Hajnal Szolga combines anthropocene and posthuman tendencies with progressive experimentation with the medium. The artist thinks in series and deals with the relationship between the dystopian environment, man and technology in the form of a kind of lyrical narrative: she mostly looks for the answer to what is the place of man’s role and does he control the processes taking place in the world.
The artist does the enlargement himself, and combines his photographs and photo paintings with photogram and chemigram techniques in addition to classic photographic processes. In image manipulation processes, she prefers environmentally friendly, degradable or recycled materials, which can also be found at home.
Hajnal Szolga’s creative process was mainly characterized by the black-and-white process until now, but during the production of the 2022 Scotopia series, she decided to create color compositions as well. Scotopia is the ability to see in the dark, which humans can only do with technical devices.
The eight-part series called Scotopia offers an opportunity to change the point of view: we see a survivor in his bleak, post-apocalyptic environment at the same time, and what he himself can see with the help of night vision goggle. The almost grotesque figure appears in an unclear role, it is not known whether he is a perpetrator or a victim. Maybe both? Is it him or are we not seeing clearly?
But not only darkness, excessive brightness can also cause temporary blindness: looking into strong light, we perceive extreme colors and shapes. While studying scotopic vision, the artist began researching these “afterimages” created by strong light. This is how he started intuitive imaging in his cameraless photography. Long experimentation with photochemicals, papers, temperature, and sequence eventually resulted not only in random gestures, but also in intentionality and tried-and-true recipes.
Technically, good examples of this are the Chemicosmos large-scale digital prints and the 8 meter long colorful analog chemigram called Timeline, where, in addition, the elements of the Scotopia photo series are transformed into historically significant abstract moments as a timeline of the history of epoches.
The molecular details inherent in the cosmic color photo paintings may resemble the photoreceptors, pins and rods that make up the eye, but we can even discover the microscopic aesthetics of bacteria in them. The photos in Petri dishes standing on transparents try to depict these phenomena, which are really laboratory processes, moments of chemical reactions, some of which were born in complete darkness.
The ensemble evokes all those elements that are organized independently of humans, such as adaptive microorganisms that have survived the ages of Earth’s history, or self-governing cybernetic systems that evade human control and that survive humanity by a long time.
The scenographic series The Invisible Man takes a different approach to the absence of human presence. The human figure appears as a negative space, an embodied lack: its environment is the superhuman scale aesthetics of switchboards, control centers, and industrial buildings. He controls the construction and destruction of his environment with the help of his machines.
The symbolic suspension of human presence simultaneously questions control over technology and ecological reality. What other utopian acts can happen? Who could be its survivors? Humans, machines or unicellular?
Kata Benedek & Hajnal Szolga