Marianne Csaky
Marianne Csaky (°1959, HU) lives in Brussels since 2011.
In 2018 she founded the artist-run showroom Streetview Anderlecht where she supports and invites young artists to exhibit their works. She works in various media, including sculpture, photography, video, and is curious about the appearance of historical and personal memory in the future.
The silk applique is based on a photograph taken on J.F. Kennedy campaigns in West Virginia in 1960.
The silk applique is based on a photograph taken on a migrant woman from Honduras at the US-Mexican border in 2018.
The silk applique is based on a photograph taken on Russian separatists in Dobalcev, Ukrain in 2015.
The photo montage print is based on frames from a footage shot in the boarder of Iraq, Iran and Turkey on Yazidi and Kurdish women fighters. Broadcasted by BBC in 2015.
The photo montage print is based on a photograph by unknown photographer on US Marines charge ashore on Guadalcanal Island in 1942. Associated Press.
The photo montage print is based on frames from a footage on German soldiers being taken as prisoners of war in 1945 in Germany. Critical Past Stock Footage.
The photograph is based on a glass negative taken by her grandfather in the 1950s. The layers cut from the base photo show the phases of her motion from a video she shot on herself in the present as she is embracing her mother’s shadow image from the past.
The film negative is based on a glass negative taken by her grandfather in the 1950s. She took colour shots of herself as if she is embracing her mother from the past. She digitally inserted her colour negative figure into the copy of the old negative and blew it up as a film negative. She made a lightbox of the original size of the glass negative with a mirror and put a lamp above the piece so that the light reflecting in the mirror makes the image visible.
Within her ongoing project The Other Planet, Marianne Csaky is asking herself how the following generations will remember mankind – maybe already on another planet – and what kind of historical and personal memories will last in the future.
Inventories of losses, or narratives of a victorious survival? During the months of the Covid lockdown, she watched hundreds of hours of archive footage and thousands of documentary photographs of events, news, and stories of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is hardly surprising that most of the news was about wars, custody, and escape.
How will all this be remembered in a world from where the Earth’s history can be observed not solely from the point of view of humans but also of all living creatures, animals, plants, and even of rocks and the entire ecosystem? Will this inherit humankind's traumas, the consequences of everything being done, still carrying it when the concrete faces and figures have long faded away and turned into silhouettes? Or will only the codes be passed on?
The project is composed of various groups of works. In the first series of works, she combines digital photo montages of archive and contemporary news footage and press photos with charcoal drawings. In the drawings, the animals participate in, suffer, or observe the events documented in the montages.
The second group of works is based on photos she took at the Belgian coast of the North Sea, where in late September at sunset the world of another planet with its alien atmospheric conditions emerges from the lights. Each photo shows a major event in the 20th and 21st centuries in the form of embroidered black silk appliques.
The third group of photo and video works has emerged from fragments of personal histories, fading, resurfacing, and then rewritten. The gestures of the human bodies and the way they arrange themselves in groups preserve and reflect the code that animates them.
Marianne Csaky is supported by the Sofam.