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Collaboration with Martin Toronyi, 2023
According to Heidegger, the world conceals its true nature by revealing itself. There is a hiding in revealing, and a revelation in concealment. Intentionally or not, when we show something we always conceal something else with the very act of conveying. The act of offering always implies the gesture of withdrawal, of retention as well. In a context where you can control what to display, what you give away is always less (and therefore always more), than the „truth”. My true self is always more complex, less comprehensible and therefore possibly less attractive than its image.
The idea of authenticity, the question of identity and its representation becomes a central issue in our present time, when personal expression is more accessible than ever － but with restrictions. The series reflects on how we’d like to be seen, how we hide within “being seen” － and how we are allowed to be seen. We tackle the notion of self-representation and censorship: we’ve created these images with the mainstream social media platform’s guidelines in mind, applying a kind of self-censorship, one might say: our knowledge of censorship regarding the depiction of nudity and sexual activity on Instagram defined the visual language we’ve chosen. In that sense the images deal with the very notion of social platforms and their troubled relation with the idea of public intimacy. We’ve tried to create a visual language that is abstract and impressionistic in it’s exhibition of human intimacy — to pass the platform’s censorship, and yet representational enough to deliver true depth and meaning.