EXHIBITION EXTENDED UNTIL 16 NOVEMBER!

Erika SZŐKE‘s solo exhibition, Main Prize of the 3rd Graphic Art Biennial of Szeklerland, 2014

We suspect and feel that the actual protagonist of Erika SZŐKE’s artworks – behind the covering layer of the more easily readable themes and motifs – is time, more precisely, time slipping by, the unfathomability of time, its continuous deferral. So that we can make time speak (even through pictures), we inevitably need the multitude of notions (of body), impressions and memories (sometimes profoundly personal, anchoring and fading, plastic and always reshaped memories, at times scattered, at times turning into sharp images) which, spatially organized, woven into one another and distinct from one another (existing in relation to one another, through one another) – are capable, perhaps, of revealing something about the mysterious laws of time and existence in time.

We would like to find words, at least fragmentary, temporarily functioning words in order to grab and temporarily fix the essence that pervades ERIKA’s artworks. To grab what gets its contours condensed into images in her particular artworks. The rich plethora of memories. The entanglement of memory and gaze. The strange, mysterious interaction and interdependence of remembrance and oblivion, the hardly decipherable grammar of our memories. The game of layers and subsets (or blind spots) populating the realm of memory, writing each other further; the fine web of generational memory, the sense and identity forming role of our memories. The questioning of recordability and representability of our memories. The dialectics of leaving traces and oblivion – the texture of the nodules of memory synopses, metasthases and substituting memories. The embrace of memories and desires, memories and traumas. The intimate relationship between memory and fictionality. The experience of finiteness, of existing in/through the body, the existence within the constraints of codes written upon our bodies. Memories and memory spaces which, as regards their essence and construction, are themselves transient metaphors.

ERIKA SZŐKE (1977) artist, photographer; she lives and carries out her artistic activity in Veľký Kýr near Nyitra. She graduated the Faculty of Fine Arts and Art Pedagogy of the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, her tutors were KAROL BARON and JANA FARMANOVÁ. In her works, besides the traditional, analog and digital techniques, she applies various experimental, self-developed procedures at the boundary of classical photography and multiplied graphics. She often creates extended photos, objects balancing between photos and three-dimensional objects. The central themes of her artworks are family, the universe of memory images, relation systems and networks within the family, the issues of social gender and gender identity as well as the representability of the interactions between memory and oblivion (at the individual or collective level). She presented her artworks at several exhibitions at home and abroad; in 2014 she won the main prize of the Graphic Art Biennial of Szeklerland.