Krystyna Bilak
livers and works in Budapest, Hungary
Stay at Schafhof: Spring 2024
Krystyna Bilak
Krystyna Bilak was born in Munkachevo, currently, an artist living in Budapest. She graduated from Photography BA at the University of Kaposvár and Photography MA at the Moholy- Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME).
Can we consider photography as a tool for extended cognition? Krystyna examines this issue in her earlier work, which also explores the interaction between people and space, and provides insight into the different areas of perception with the tools of photography. While studying the human cognitive function, she takes steps to get to know herself. Krystyna sees photography as a reconnaissance tool. For getting acquainted with the unknown areas, she stretches the possibilities of the medium and experiments with frontier topics.
At first, through personal topics, she outlined herself with photography, and later on, the characteristics of the medium and its relation to human and reality began to interest her. She explores the subject of her current interest in details, in many different methods, experimenting with various media to understand the topic as a whole picture. At the moment, she is interested in the directed viewpoint created with images and the features of image reading. She examines the functionality of photography, experiments with its medial possibilities, breaks the image into layers and builds a new reality. She was represented in several national and international exhibitions. From 2016, she is a member of the Studio of Young Photographers. In 2017 she was awarded the Photography Scholarship by The Association of Hungarian Photographers. From 2018 she is a member of The Studio of Young Artists’ Association. In 2019 she won the Budapest Portfolio Review and she is part of the Futures photography platform. She was shortlisted for the Esterhazy Art Award in 2021.
Artwork:
Let Your Eyes Dance
Stand with your legs apart. Bend forward.
Look back between your legs. Thank you.
Now look around and take stock of what you see.
The world has been stood on its head.
(István Örkény: „Das Groteske (ein praktischer Ansatz)“; übersetzt von Judith Sollosy)
In my work, I create fictious constructions and compositions that deceive the eyes and invite for the viewer to decipher them.
Here, the photograph loses its functionality in the classical sense; its aim is not the decryption of the narrative. I examine the process of viewing the image and its guided reception while exploring the questions related to the media itself. Ordinary spectacles form visual compositions that propound the existence of one-dimensionality within the image in multiple ways. I play around with tools of visual deception, for example, by creating a separate space and a new reality within the image via mimetic tools.
I raise questions related to the detailed study of the image within the image, the focus on the various layers of the photog- raphs, and the recipients intuition and creativity resulting from the context of the images. The simulacrum’ is generated by the representation of distorted proportions and the manual manipulation of the images. The superimposition of the various layers creates a three-dimensional space within the two-dimensional image. The manual manipulations blur or frame, highlight or hide objects, which, in effect, are crumpled, bent, and incorporated into real situations. As our gaze gets focused and shattered by these manipulations, our observation offers the possibility for decryption, and it makes us reflect on the process of creation as welt as the structure of the image. These all direct our attention to the creative logic behind the photograph and remind us that we are actually looking at the photograph, and not the things photographed. We do not lose ourselves in the image, instead we experience the way the photograph works. With all the pictures we scroll through day by day, we hardly even know how each of them was created, and when there was computer aided post-processing applied to it. My photographs make it possible to decrypt the creative method, which draws attention to which decisions make the chain of the Idea, the creative process, and the presentation create the final Image.
Dates in Freising
Residency program
