TOBE Gallery is organizing its second joint exhibition with MOME Photography students, entitled VITAMIN-B. The joint exhibition will give students the opportunity to gain professional experience in the world of commercial galleries and will also give professionals the chance to discover and get to know young talent. The exhibition was organised with the participation of students from several departments of the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design Budapest (MOME): Boglár Berecz (Graphic Design), Tímea Varga (Design and Art Management).
Exhibited students: Patrícia Koroknai, Gergely Kováts, Sveta M. Aykuo.
Patrícia Koroknai started photography in 2018 mainly working on applied photography projects but her passion for photography and visual arts started a lot earlier. Before applying to the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Photography MA, she studied applied photography, and for one year, drawing and visual representation. In her current work, she focuses on depression but not representing it as a medical condition but rather as a result of constant thoughts of not finding our place in the world or failing temporarily of searching for meaning.
Limbus [ongoing project] (2022-)
Depression is an intense psychological condition that is not simply a fleeting sadness, but a profoundly entrenched state of distress that alters one’s perception, emotions, and daily experiences. This work intends to deal with not just a mental disorder but its consequences to see life as meaningless or inversely, the confusion caused by being failed to find meaning.
This series is also about the never-ending fight between the unconscious and conscious self, resulting in frustration, constant anxiety, and a distorted view of our physical world. It explores the theme mainly through abstract works, depicting mental chaos. – Patrícia K.
Gergely Kováts is a self-taught photographer based in Budapest. After making images for over a decade without any institutional background, he’s currently studying at Moholy-Nagy University’s photography MA programme. He works on long-term projects springing from personal experience, using both staged and unstaged photographs, blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction, revealing the in-between domain of the ambiguous.
best of all possible worlds [ongoing project] (2022-)
According to Leibniz’s thesis our world is the best of all possible worlds, otherwise it wouldn’t have been logical for God to create it. But from the beginning of the 20th century we started to create more and more intricate imaginary worlds for ourselves to temporarily escape the problems of reality. The decline of utopian thinking in western culture overlaps with the rise of these secondary worlds; we can still imagine social and economic systems that are different from ours, just not on this planet.
Sveta M. moved to Budapest to continue her artistic practice. Currently, she is getting master’s degree in photography at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. Aykuo is an on-going alter-ego project by Sveta, a multidisciplinary artist and creative director from Sakha Republic. In ‘Aykuo’ Sveta focuses on the culture of the northern ethnicities in Siberia, especially Sakha, and reflects on the actual geopolitical agenda. Rethinking herself as a representative of an ethnic group and living in Europe, she collects remaining fragments of indigenous Sakha culture and looks for the fissioned archaic core in its current state of historical development.
hidden (2022)
Nowadays, lots of people try to hide: some of them run from political situations, others try not to be caught by flying bullets, thirds want to become invisible for tracking systems, and fourths go to forests. Every attempt to hide becomes a ‘game’: we disguise ourselves like animals whose camouflage technique is their colouration. The forest becomes a place of reconnection with an animalistic desire to escape.
In ‘Hidden’ I try to explore the concept of ‘remaining unnoticed’ on different levels in the context of the current global instability. Natural locations like caves, mountains, fields and forests remind us of archaic places for hiding. Images of the bunker, trench and anthill become a second layer of meaning, in which the animal world intersects with the echo of the actual geopolitical conflicts. – Sveta, M. Aykuo
VITAMIN – B
July 26 – August 18, 2023
TOBE Gallery
1088 Budapest, Bródy Sándor u. 36
www.tobegallery.hu
