February 21 – March 19 2013

Anna Fabricius lives and works in Budapest, where she finished PhD at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2011. She is one of the most internationally renowned Hungarian artists of younger generation who regularly exhibit in the established art contexts. Last year she was a resident guest of the Maribor European Capital of Culture. The exhibition presented in Photon show selection of three series, connected by semantic – linguistic exploration of images, meanings, and their identification in the language. At the same time all three series are characterized by the recognizable personal, almost intimate iconography. All three series are created with a strong “conceptual”, “staged”, we could also say, performative approach.

Polaroid pictures, lacking any kind of story, are completed with expressions / captions taken from fortune telling cards in the series Unpredictable Events of the Future. These expressions/captions instantly determine the line of interpretation for the life situations depicted on the photos at the moment those are drawn, neutralizing the freedom of choice in the process. After the photo shoot, people on the pictures were allowed to choose freely from the fortune telling cards, thus determining the interpretation of the pictures. For the series Vaj-Voi  Fabricius found several sentences that sound very similar in Finnish and Hungarian, and she took photographs of situations corresponding to these sentences. At the same time, the sentence structures and combinations are not ordinary, and the alliterations that emerge in the Hungarian text and the unique rhythms create a poetic effect. In preparation for her Useless Best Wishes series, artist asked her foreign friends and acquaintances to send her for her birthday, instead of the usual useless best wishes, charms that have magic powers and help predict disasters or fend them off. The captions to the photographs in this series, hence, do not say explicitly what they are referring to (perhaps for some magical reason), but only name the act or situation that is to be avoided.