ONCE UPON A TIME & FICTION OF REALITY / SOLO EXHIBITION / 12.03.2020. – 12.04.2020. BRODY HOUSE – Budapest, Hungary

The series “Once Upon a Times” revolves around the motifs of family and intimacy. Each picture brings forth details based on my childhood memories, with the series capturing a milieu, a part of my childhood focusing on family, friendly gatherings and celebrations in Budapest between 1990-1996.

Végh’s archive of family images allows for the viewer to gain an insiders perspective of the artist’s intimate, personal living space. The series is also inspired by the title of
József Rippl-Rónai’s painting “When One Lives on Memories”.

Memories are easily combined with the collective memory, and through the series, the settings of school events, carnival celebrations, family gatherings, and their interiors are a familiar scene to us all, recalling fragments of our past. The above, coupled with the playful world of children, are a projection of a subjective reality. However, what becomes familiar to us, greatly depends on the social and cultural factors and customs that affect our environment, and these are what our entire culture and traditions are organised around, including what we celebrate, based on nationality.
The way our memories form, and their subjective selection is always accompanied by an emotional imprint, as for example, our holidays are also associated with events that
differ from the ordinary everyday routine. Further, memories coupled with emotions evoked by a person, are likely to be better preserved in the form of a memory over time. This is the kind of remembrance, that not only occurs in the individual, but in all of us at the same time.

 

Photos by: Bianka Alexandra Muskáth