Artist
Hanna Rédling
Hanna Rédling was born in Pécs in 1993 and now divides her time in Budapest and Rotterdam. She holds a BA and MA in Photography from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (Budapest) and studied Photography at Willem de Kooning Academie (Rotterdam). Her works focus on the uncertainty of present existence and understanding and defining individual and collective nostalgia. Her photographs show childish curiosity and optimism merged with anxieties of unpredictability of the future and virtual world simultaneously. The attitude, that analyses the memories of the past at once, and the fever dream-like present and future at other times, calls forth an alternative world that converges in space and time. The elastic and jelly-like texture keeps recurring on Hanna’s photographs and this element carries the possibility of both ascension and ‘sinking in mud’ feeling. Her main aim is to image those spiritual and physical in-between states that we experience in our lives - during these experiences we have departed already but have not reached our objective yet. She received the scholarship of the Association of Hungarian Photographers in 2020 and won the Pécsi József Photography Grant in 2021 and 2022. Her most recent works were exhibited at Unseen Photography Fair in Amsterdam in autumn 2021. She has been represented by Erika Deák Gallery in Budapest since April 2021.
When The Water Is Stirred
How can nostalgia become a stronghold in a world where we experience a loss of control daily in various areas of life? How do we relate to this special evocation of the past at the border between virtual and real life? Can technology now once again revolutionize the way we archive memories and recall the past? How is the medium of photography expanding in line with the spirit of the times?
The concept of nostalgia has undergone several transformations since the seventeenth century, with the meaning of the term moving from a spatial to a temporal nostalgia and focusing on meaningful experiences of the past of an individual or community. Nostalgia has now become a defense mechanism of the psyche, a complex, ambivalent emotional state that is difficult to define, despite the fact that it is a familiar and recurring experience in our everyday lives. It is fundamentally a personal experience, but also a social sentiment, the visual representation of which has developed strong and regularly repeated visual patterns over the decades. The unpredictability of our time, recent global events, accelerating technological development and alienated human presence have given the concept an additional layer of meaning, which calls for a search for new ways of photographic representation from a new perspective.
Using personal nostalgia and passages of self-discovery, I seek new tools and ways of visual expression that allow me to capture the peculiar atmosphere of postmodern nostalgia, its function of masking and embellishing negative experiences, and the grotesque, anxious feeling that we often see this notion today not as an opportunity but as a compulsively evoked point of reference.
ColorTV, QueenBeds, Exotik Dreams
My work Color TV, Queen Beds, Exotik Dreams is about facing our own cultural heritage—through the world of Hungarian motels built during the regime change— and my personal self-definition.
Around 1989, the Hungarian nation experienced enormous political, economic and social change and, as a result, the whole nation experienced being in an in-between space, a liminal space: they had to grow up to handle problems never lived through before their generation. People experienced euphoria and excitement alongside fear and anxiety at the same time, as they did not know what the future might hold. Their escapism materialized as exotic dreams about Western trends, wealth, life and opportunities they might encounter. These special motels that I photographed genuinely preserve the atmosphere of the transformation from socialism into a democratic states’ unique era.
During the last year, something began to change in my life. I started to feel different, uncertain about my future, questioning things I was confident in before. I felt as if I lost the ground I stood on and was stuck between two doors—I did not know how to exit. Unexpectedly, I started to feel a strong relation and connection to those motels which I have been collecting and documenting for years. Their history and my uprootedness resonated: hopefulness and fearfulness was within me and the rooms at the same time.
The strong Eastern European tacky style of these places made me feel at home. Their cheap and DIY solutions, all the colors, materials and patterns—their desire to achieve a modern and luxurious look—reminded me of my roots, my childhood, all my weaknesses and strengths. The hotels also represented our traditions and visual culture. It made me think how the ‘American Dream’ is never going to happen, and how I will never be a Western girl with natural confidence. On the other hand, I have also realized the beauty in our collective melancholy, in our unbroken ingenuity, in our bitter humor. How can all the despised and tacky things become so loveable? How can we face them and forge strength out of them?
These special motels, which reflect the regime change, helped me deal with emotions and situations I never felt before, and they created the mental space I needed in order to understand a little bit better the times we live in; making this project was about relearning, redefining and accepting where we as people come from and where we are heading.