Lilla Szántói: Tactile Vision

Visiting is free of charge
August 26, 2020 – October 11, 2020
Tuesday – Friday 2pm – 7pm
Weekend 11am – 7 pm
Closed on Monday and on public holidays.
Capa Center – Project Room
Curator: Gellér Judit

Senses and feelings. Leaving a trace and being untraceable. Visible and invisible. The exhibition titled Tactile Vision as a whole is delineated by three works of Lilla Szántói created in different years, with different notions, and using different techniques. The three series capture phenomena based on tactile perception using various photography techniques.

Over the past years, especially with the rise of digital devices – particularly touchscreen smartphones, – our sensation as well as the meaning and importance of “touching” have been transformed. The series titled Érintés (Touch) focuses on our motions and gestures carried out on smartphone screens. When in the course of our everyday communication we get in touch with each other, we do all kinds of activities in the virtual space from unlocking our screens to writing messages. These touches are like finger-painting abstract images that last for only moments, then vanish. The marks captured in the photographs, although imprints of actual events, only contain hints of what actually happened.

The series and photo book titled Szél (Wind) consists of photographs taken on a journey. Just like haiku in poetry, the photographs, as snapshots in time, focus on exploring and understanding nature, while the invisible, gentle touch of the wind brings relief to the body on the long, hot summer road. The photographs appear on the pages of a book, which was produced via Risograph printing, a digital reproduction process. From the inspiring inception – the invisible touch of the wind sweeping over the skin – to the spreading of the ink on the paper, the material goes through numerous chemical processes and reactions before the original vision appears in an abstract way.

The image that inspired her latest work titled Kulcsszó: könyv (Keyword: book) surfaced from her family archives. Grandma Eta is sitting on the sofa in her nylon housecoat with a book in her hands. It is just like so many other photographs of the online photography collection Fortepan, where we see people reading and flipping through the pages of books in family and private pictures. The images of the series, which contain details of photographs selected from the collection via keyword search, explore the various ways a book can be touched. In addition, the keyword compositions associated with the images work almost like poems.

The photographs and photo books of Lilla Szántói reveal delicate whiffles and observations, through which we do not only get a chance to see the various forms and motions but can also realize their importance and necessity: to feel what we sense.

Judit Gellér, curator

Lilla Szántói, photographer, was born in Budapest in 1991. She received her B.A. in Photography at the Kaposvár University in 2014, and she presently studies at the Budapest Metropolitan University in the Art and Design Management MA program. She was a member of the Studio of Young Photographers between 2014 and 2017. Her photography series have been regularly showcased at group exhibitions since 2013. In her work, she is interested in the relationship between the photograph and the book, and she creates photobooks. She is the founder and the leader of the creative book workshop Lapozó, which focuses on preserving the values of manual techniques via graphic art, analog photography, and bookbinding. Her first solo exhibition Tactile Vision presents three series from her latest works in the Project Room of the Capa Center.