The Enigma of Private Images: Addressing the Overlooked Aspects of Everyday Visual Culture (screening and presentation on February 25, 2025)

Join us on a documentary screening and presentation in cooperation with the Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography on Tuesday, February 25, 2025 

In collaboration with the Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography, we invite the students of the CEU to a screening of two short documentaries, created twenty years apart, that explore marginalized communities and overlooked aspects of everyday visual culture in the East-Central European region. Following the screenings, Róza Tekla Szilágyi and Endre Cserna of Eidolon Centre, will present on the contexts and history of studying everyday photography in Hungary, as well as their institutions work. An open discussion on people’s unique relationships with 20th-century image-making, memory, and representation, led by Oksana Sarkisova, will conclude the event.

CSENDORSZÁG (“Silence Country”), 2002.

director: Róbert Lakatos
cinematographer: Arthur Bálint
37 min.

The young teenager Alfi has a hearing impairment. He is studying at a special needs school in Cluj-Napoca. During the summer holidays he returns to his home village in Gyimes. Through the efforts of his father he receives an old camera from the local deaf-mute photographer. While he begins to learn the art of photography he is forced to communicate with those around him. With the help of photography Alfi begins to discover people.

THESE ARE NOT OUR MEMORIES, 2022.

director: Aseneth Suarez Ruiz, Patrick Alexander
cinematographer: Carlos Arango de Montis
23 min.

Some of our memories are vivid, others dim, some of us want to remember it all, others try to forget. When the filmmakers find a discarded box of family photographs on a street in Budapest, they set on a quest to see personal stories behind the images. What awakens a personal memory? And how much fantasy and projection is evoked by the images? Walking a thin line between memory and imagination, the filmmakers adopt the discarded traces of the lives of others. Whose memories are these?

The films will be screened in their original languages with English subtitles.

Time and Location: Tuesday, February 25, 2025 at 17.40 | D-002 

The films are presented and discussed by Róza Tekla Szilágyi and Endre Cserna of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography. 

Róza Tekla Szilágyi (b. 1993) lives and works in Budapest. She graduated in Art History and Aesthetics from Eotvos Lorand University, and then worked for six months at the PiArtworks Contemporary Gallery in Istanbul. She continued her studies at the University of Fine Arts Budapest with a Masters degree in Contemporary Art Theory and Curatorial Studies. She has been publishing in national and international art magazines and publications since 2012. She is founder of the no longer active Omnivore Gallery, a project-based non-profit contemporary art space that was selected to be part of the My Art Guide – Central Eastern Europe volume representing the upcoming contemporary Hungarian art scene. She was senior curator of the Hybridart Space Contemporary Art Gallery in Budapest (2017-2018) curating exhibitions for Zsolt Asztalos (To die for a principle), Gwizdala Dáriusz (I'm sorry_Sándor Weöres & Öcsi Puskás) and Zsombor Pólya. Venturing into her interest in art theory and art criticism she was senior associate at Artmagazin (2016-2023) and editor-in-chief of Artmagazin Online (2021-2023), while publishing articles and conducting a series of interviews in English with nationally recognised visual artists for several years. In 2021 she was the editor of the vernacular photography album titled Fortepan Masters – in 2022 the book was on the shortlist of the Les Rencontres de la Photographie's 2022 Book Awards in the historical book category. Currently she is the director of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography.

Endre Cserna (b. 1997) is a Budapest-based artist and cultural journalist. He earned his diploma from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest in 2020. Currently, he works as Head of Programming at Eidolon Centre. He was a founding member of the countercultural magazine Utca & Karrier, and co-hosted its left-field radio show. From 2021 to 2023, he worked as Assistant Curator at the House of Hungarian Photographers, managing major exhibitions and curating small- and medium-scale shows. He also served as co-chair and board member of the Studio of Young Artists’ Association (FKSE) in Budapest—Hungary’s longest-operating advocacy organisation for artists and cultural workers—from 2021 until early 2024. In 2023, he was honoured with the Horváth Award for Art Criticism. He is a member of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA) and the art collective Autonomous Goblin Fourteen.