The current simultaneous political, social and environmental catastrophes reinforce each other, resulting in an absurd normalisation at both individual and collective levels. Disintegration manifests everywhere: alienation from nature, from each other, from science, religion, ethics, and tradition reached unprecedented depths. The suicidal karma of the individual and society is accepted with poignant surrender. With deliberate apathy, we are moving toward the fatal events. We even aestheticise it, reveling in the collapse. It could be called the age of stupidity. This is the Zeitgeist. Or more like Zeitgeistlosigkeit.
Hajnal Szolga explores these absurd, existential, and ethical dilemmas in her works. While in Traces of Survival, Scotopia and Melt, the passive bystander figure of the survivor appears, Bunker and No Fear are narrative scenographies without characters. There’s action, no actor, no one to identify with, but no one to blame either… at least not in the pictures. If Allen Feldman was right that “the event is not what happened, but what can be told as a story,” this is the story of late-capitalist convenience logic. An ambivalent tale caught between servitude and vulnerability.
These series are documentations of the past, defining images of contemporary collective consciousness, and also scenarios for the future. The absence of actors invites viewers to identify with the passive perpetrator and active victim.
The emotional turmoil is conveyed beyond the images of a destroyed nature through the material. As the artist applies chemigram and photogram methods, the development process becomes a stretch of intention and coincidence: a different result is obtained if the reaction is interrupted. The experimental method paraphrases the exhibition’s dilemma: what if we did something?
Hajnal Szolga, a Berlin-based photographer, presents her first solo exhibition in Hungary, showing her work from the last three years.
Kata Benedek