BUDAPEST.- The exhibition In the Meantime, in Between Time presents two series from Viola Fátyol; the Orando et laborando and the still ongoing In Between.

Orando et laborando is the diploma work of the artist made in 2011. The series is based on the experience of her own high school years, which she, ten years after graduating, transposed into a new quality. On the one hand, the images are the imprints of the inner world of the countryside religious school: memories of confinement and isolation, the significance of traditions and rituals and the peculiar experience of the teen-age are condensed in them. On the other hand, the focus of the series is neither the complex social and cultural phenomena of an educational institution nor the daily life, feelings and subjective experience of the students depicted on the photographs. In fact, the ballad-like pictures and scenes are the projections of the artist's own memories and conceptions with which she relates to the school, and the identity-shaping force of the years spent at the alma mater. The emphatic relations between the portrayed youngsters and the community as a unifying power became the driving forces of the series.

In the video entitled Holy Communion the students replay the liturgy of the holy communion in a staged scene; meanwhile, on a rotating basis, all of them give and take the Eucharist. As a result of the absurd situation, the performers are giggling and are unable to play their roles seriously.

The making of Orando et laborando was inevitably a self-reflexive process: returning to the lyceum exposesd the photographer with her former self, calling forth pleasant and ungrateful, but definitely determining experiences. Quoting the title of Viola Fátyol's recent exhibition, this series is also sort of a fieldwork. But because of the personal involvement, the Calvinist high school is not an unknown terrain any more. Her position therefore is a dual one. The familiar spaces, hallways, displays, scents and customs make her an insider - she is still part of the imagined community of students; but after a decade, her student status has partly been replaced with the role of the researcher and of the documentarist, which inevitably makes her an outsider. The fact that her point of view once had been shaped by the currently researched field, contributes to the complexity of the situation.

Besides Orando et laborando the other (ongoing) series presented in the framework of the exhibition is the In Between that follows the path of the Family Drawing series finished in 2012. The only difference is the slight shift of perspective.

Reaching the 30th birthday suddenly prompted the artist to make account of her life so far: which stage of life she is in, what is already behind her and what the future will possibly bring. The works can therefore be regarded as casts of short, hardly recognizable transitions between certain phases of her life.

The passing of the grandmother had fallen into this vulnerable state of transition that – although from another angle – pulls the artist to another stage of her life. In the recent past, due to the aforementioned events, the formerly evident status quo traversed and transformed. The series is thus an attempt, an experiment to process these changes and to keep up with them.

Viola Fátyol (1983, Debrecen) received her diploma in 2006 from the Visual Communication Teacher Department at the Eszterházy Károly College in Eger, and then in 2011 from the Master in Photography Department at the Moholy-Nagy University of Applied Arts (MOME). She is currently a doctoral student at MOME. In 2010, she was a student in The Netherlands, at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam. She had solo and group exhibitions in Hungary and abroad (in Germany, Great Britain, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Italy and Poland)/

In her artistic practice, she is primarily engaged with the themes of family, individual heritage and identity, and the causal relations of these. The close observation and analytical need for cataloguing memories, and their re-enacting and recreation offers the possibility of the reformulation of the set of relations between family members.