Bence Bakonyi | Parallels

solo exhibition

Bence Bakonyi's exhibition Parallels will present works from three series: After Five Years, Segue, and his newest, We are all right here, combining and comparing the complex topics of living at the opposite ends of the world.
Five years ago, a terrible natural disaster shook the surroundings of Haiti’s capital. With his photographs in After Five Years series the artist asks questions about what has changed over time. Has Haiti recovered from its ruined state? How much has this overly unfortunate country and its capital city improved over half a decade? Bence was able to experience and learn about the poverty that Haiti has to face. The everyday struggle to achieve the minimum subsistence level and the despaired atmosphere. Due to the state of public safety, 80% of photographs in the series had to be taken from behind a darkened car window.
Throughout his one year stay in China, Bence was looking for home in a world completely unknown to him. And because home is where one can find himself, the photographs in the Segue can also be seen as self-portraits projected onto China. „Without assistance and not being able to speak Chinese, it was hard for me to communicate with people. Therefore, I refrained from picturing humans and I focused on their environment instead.” – says Bence Bakonyi. – „In the first part of my journey I had been wandering through the countryside, trying to avoid the metropolitan areas, but with time, I found myself in ever larger cities. In my journey's second part, it was increasingly challenging to avoid the portrayal of humans. The series follows the development of my voyage, as I gradually approached, starting from rural existence, the man-made world.”
For the series ‘We are all right here’ the artist was travelling around rural Hungary, capturing the roads from above, while engaging in conversation with locals in every village. The stories, the interactions all shaped the course of this new photographs.
The synergy of three, on the first glance, separate topics come together in Parallels exhibition at Faur Zsófi Gallery. As you wonder through the gallery’s rooms, the series are hard to separatevisually due to the soft and light similarity in the photography style, although, the details speak louder and louder with every photograph examined to pieces.