Szilvia Bolla, Running Up That Hill at Glassyard Gallery, Budapest

“Running Up That Hill” by Szilvia Bolla, curated by Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács, at Glassyard Gallery, Budapest, 22/03/2024-24/05/2024.

The art of Szilvia Bolla, which has started with abstract anti-photographs reacting against the depressive overconsumption of pictures, now arrived at a post-photographic praxis that tackles the subject of depression itself. As depression is both individual and social, biological and political, the exhibition Running Up that Hill confronts the aesthetic and political dimensions of personal, transgenerational as well as systemic depression of a depressive economical-ideological system.

The audio-visual installations, reconstructing autobiographical and symbolic mnemotopes, the pharmaco- kinetic sculptures of bodies deformed by the biopower, in addition to the neurograms based on the analogy between the photograph and the skin, are assembled as points in a depresthetic and psychopolitical manifesto.

Formal problems and problem-forms of Bolla, dismantling the dichotomies of the visible and the invisible, the material and immaterial, the dead and the alive, previously discussed in a photo-ontological and photo-critical context, here are reprogrammed to create a network of connections from Kate Bush to Walter Benjamin, from spectropolitics to Secession, or from black metal to material feminism.