Dávid Biró

Dávid Biró, born 1992 in Szentendre, Hungary
lives and works in Budapest, Hungary

Stay at Schafhof: Spring 2024

Dávid Biró

Dávid Biró, photographer and visual artist, lives and works in Budapest. He completed BA in Photography at the University of Kaposvár and MA in Photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts.

Dávid Biró’s work is characterized by an interest in technology and its critical examination. His aim is to map the technological environment that defines our everyday life to uncover their social and political effects. Meanwhile, he brings into play the ethical issue of observation and being observed, which is without exaggeration one of the most important dilemmas of our time. This creative attitude provides a critical reading of the surveillance capitalism and techno-positivist approach. As an artist, his primary goal is to assess the effects of current trends and thereby develop a conscious and healthy user attitude with which we can face the challenges created by our renewable digital devices.

Biró is a representative of the new generation of Hungarian photographers, his works are regularly featured in Hungarian and international art festivals and exhibition spaces, such as Ludwig Museum, MODEM, Q Contemporary, Capa Center and Mai Manó Ház. Between 2017-2022, he was represented by Trapéz Galéria. In 2018, he was a finalist in the Dutch ING Unseen Talent Award, in 2022 he won the MODEM award, in 2021 and 2022 he received a József Pécsi creative scholarship, in 2022-2023 he was a lecturer at the MOME photography master department.

Artwork:

Title: Do You Accept Cookies?

There are only a few things, which we can consider so exclusively our own as our faces. One of the most basic elements of our identity is our most intimate, yet most public part. We barely ever cover this surface of our body, not even in public space, and in some countries, it is considered to be a crime to cover one’s face in particular spaces. Therefore it seems like it is our duty to always be identifiable when we enter somewhere. But how far this duty of identification extends, and where does the monitoring of people change into illegal and authoritarian surveillance?
In his work, Do you accept cookies? Dávid Biró carefully examines the mechanism of face-recognition systems. The series could hardly be more current, as the face is beginning to take on the role of fingerprint thanks to the latest technologies. More and more people are using phones that can be unlocked by face scanning, and cameras in the public space are increasingly using face detection for crime prevention and for law enforcement reasons.

Biró creates face-imitating installations, in order to experiment on what the human eye recognises as a face, and what appears to be a face according to the algorithm of mobile cameras as well. It is an interesting, instructive experience to examine these pictures through a camera of a mobile phone.

It is beyond doubt that the time has come for us to start dealing with our personal data much more carefully. Although we can decide to delete our profile from social media platforms, and not to accept cookies on websites, we can not just simply log out from the face recognition system of public spaces. Dávid Biró attempts to detect the blind spots of the technology of face recognition and to elude the system using various hacks. Meanwhile, he takes the ethical issue of observation and being the one who is observed into the discussion, which is unquestionably one of the most important dilemmas of our time. 

Dates in Freising

Residency Program