VIOLA FÁTYOL IS THE WINNER OF THE CAPA GRAND PRIZE HUNGARY 2016
The jury selected Viola Fátyol for her entry entitled If you have a heart, what you did to me, hurts you too as the second Capa Grand Prize Hungary-winner in 2016.
The Robert Capa Photography Grand Prize Hungary was founded in 2014 by the Capa Center to recognize the work of artists who produce an outstanding achievement in the field of Hungarian photography. The awards were decided in two stages by a five-member jury of Hungarian and international professionals. In May the jury selected three candidates – and awarded each of them with a fellowship of HUF 500 000 (approx. €1600 or $1800) – for the Grand Prize of HUF 5 million (approx. €16,000 or $18,000) in total. The jury appreciated Viola FÁTYOL’s work in the last six month, so they selected her as the second Grand Prize Hungary-winning photographer in 2016. Viola FÁTYOL received a cash award of HUF 3.5 million (approx. €11,000 or $13,000) at the award ceremony on October 21, held on the eve of Robert Capa’s 103rd birth anniversary in the Capa Center.
Viola Fátyol: If you have a heart, what you did to me, hurts you too
Vámospécs is situated in Hajdú-Bihar County, twelve kilometres from the eastern border of Hungary. Its population is about five thousand people. Most of its residents traditionally work in agriculture or do farming at home besides their other jobs. The town is struggling with the problems of peripheral existence from the geographical, economic, and cultural aspects.
The folk choir has been operating for forty years; its members are mostly elderly women, who can, for the first time, afford to do intellectual-cultural activities regularly in their years of retirement. They attend the community for different reasons: to cope with loneliness, to overcome personal tragedies, or simply for the joy of singing.
We have been singing together since 2013.
WORKS BY THE FELLOWS
How can something remain exciting in today’s globalized world? What do we count as mistakes or as a natural characteristic of a certain occurrence? Can we differentiate them from each other? How much does one need to tell about a certain subject for us to get the whole picture? These are the questions that Zsolt Ficsor is trying to find the answer for in his photo series called Soroksár.
We usually absorb impressions of new places or people without even noticing them, or we are simply unconcerned towards them. We often forget to stay open for certain things that are playing a temporary part in our lives. Zsolt however, during his presence there due to work, was very much open towards Soroksár. He wanted to know and to absorb the district, to filter out the most of its unique character. During the period of his visits that lasted for about half a year, he got more and more closer to the community, he made acquaintances, and by taking pictures he was seeking answers for questions like: How can the identity of a district survive? How much and in what quality do we adhere to our roots? What are we like in general?
His humane approach to people reflects through his vision, it gives us the comfort to be as we truly are. The eventuality on his pictures are not character flaws but concomitants of the human being. They show the adherence to traditions in today‘s mankind, the society that still tries to process the condition of being rootless, and the odd mixture of all these. Besides, his photography experimenting with the amount of how much one can extract from reality without losing objectivity. Creation of an aura that is built from small details, a documentation of an era.
After the regime change, many people did not understand the role of cultural houses. They were seen as remnants of socialism and outdated institutions. But whatever they thought, the network of cultural houses eventually remained here for us a legacy. The Hungarian cultural houses are changing nowadays and this transformation often go with tenseness, absurd situations, humor but beauty as well. These houses are completely varying concerning their financing and operating systems, attendance and organized events, as well as the condition of the buildings and their external appearance. The small rural settlements’ culture houses, like border fortress warriors, function as the only community and cultural space most easily available for locals. With the termination of factories the former trade union’s institutions got into a very serious position, however, they are still trying to perform their function. At other, mainly government-funded buildings, such external and internal transformations occurred that many renewed rural cultural houses could easily rival with the quality of an event center in Budapest. The transition period has begun but there are still numerous buildings that are far from being able to completely leave behind their past. As Zsolt K. Horváth put it in his study, cultural houses are visual signals in the social space, inevitable records of an age. This statement is still true; in many cases in a quite startling way. The scenery that welcomes us evokes the world of past decades in us and its concept of the relation between culture and society. Different time layers have been piling up in these buildings as with years the maintainers and users of the houses are continuously adding to or taking away from the total picture. They remind us of the past, sometimes so much that we can even read from the sight itself. Here, in these places with their special atmosphere, many people’s recreational activity and entertainment happen; sometimes it is their only regular contact with culture. I think that the development of our culture houses is a cultural-historical milestone, and it might be important to understand that now we are living in a time when we can still witness a slow but final closing of an era.
PUBLIC PRESENTATION OF THE CAPA GRAND PRIZE HUNGARY 2016 FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENTS
The three fellowship recipients selected earlier – Viola Fátyol, Zsolt Ficsór and Sára Erzsébet Timár – gave a report on their work to the jury in a public presentation event at the international contemporary art fair Art Market Budapest on October 14, 2016.
