Peter Weiler's Presentation - Online Streaming

VOID

Never were we more connected,

never were we so lonely

To build a tunnel, often two teams start digging at the two ends, and if all works out, they meet in the middle. I also started the research of my MFA thesis from two entry points: Discussing my family’s history in the context of life during and after World War II, and while conducting research on how loneliness shapes our life and artistic creativity.   A VOID is an absence. Any Jewish Hungarian family could tell a story of absent relatives, absent dreams, broken family trees. As an artist, I was always telling stories of Hungarian history, art history, collective memories of our life under the Socialist dictatorship. I never told my family’s history, and now the time has come to dive deep into my own upbringing and how I became an artist.

During COVID I bought a slide scanner and started to digitize my family’s photographs. My parents kept the glass slides safe in their original boxes.

I had two grandmothers. My maternal one loved to take photographs. She never went anywhere without a camera. Our every move and every smile were recorded by her. No family event was complete without her photos. In fact, the photos made those moments truly real. My paternal grandmother, who I, unfortunately, know much less about burnt the photographs of that side of the family. So, we don’t have visual records of my father growing up. These two extreme attitudes towards photography: one grandmother loving, collecting, archiving every photograph, and on the other side of the family burning the photos led me to the creation process of the VOID exhibition.

In the hot light of the slide projector the white empty shape is loss and grief with a calm sense of expectation. The projector is illuminating the wall of the darkroom.

The VOID pictures were painted with oil, every tube has the weight of a stone.

Peter Weiler is one of the most well-known Hungarian visual artists. With subtle humor he creates flash snapshots of the contemporary challenges of our life.  His works deal with political and emotional aspects of life in Hungary. Weiler often juxtaposes the banality of modern city life with the privileges and comfort of our technology-oriented society.

Weiler lives in Budapest, and he graduates from School of Visual Arts, New York in the Summer of 2021. This VOID exhibition and presentation is part of his thesis project.

His website is available HERE.