Daniel? Come in.
Starting in 2019, my first body of work ever, entitled “Daniel? Come in.”, is my deeply intimate attempt of looking into the mirror and visually showing an authentic imprint of my life. As this subject is related to my personality, I consequently had to start at my origin.
I was born 1985 in Budapest, Hungary. Growing up in a concrete block of flats in the outer districts of Budapest, I still remember a feeling of greyness, bleakness and anonymity. When I was at the age of two, we moved to Germany as my father found work there. However, we have kept our apartment in Budapest to be able to visit our family regularly.
Ever since, I have somehow felt emotionally and physically disconnected to my Hungarian relatives, not wanting to know a lot about my ancestry. The generation of my grandparents suffered from emotional emptiness and was mostly dominated by domestic violence, quarrels and humiliation with a clear impact on our family’s history. In order to protect myself, I tried to keep myself away from these things, so that I haven’t seen my grandparents for years.
2019 was my first trip back home to Budapest on my own. With camera in hand, acting as mediator and giving me a certain safe distance, I began searching for the connection to my childhood in Budapest and capture the raw, emotional honesty at my grandparent’s place with an artful tenderness. Suddenly, chaos and vulnerability seemed acceptable. The balancing act is no longer about aesthetics and posed situations but critical distance and emotional engagement, empathy and voyeurism.