This Friday, Photo Cluster Galerie opens the artist’s first solo exhibition in Austria, titled Inside a Woman’s Chambers. Erka Shalari, from Les Nouveaux Riches magazine, visited the artist during her stay in Vienna.
ES: Your artist portfolio intriguingly begins/ or ends with the work In Searching for Truth (2006). Do you see your artistic journey as an ongoing pursuit of this truth?
AT: Interesting question! I assembled my portfolio linearly, but not chronologically. The last image, a character going towards the light seemed to leave an open ending. But it’s true, I am and have been on some sort of search.
ES: Assigning space to memory. What does this bring to one?
AT: I find some sort of healing process by revisiting past, and maybe it gives a stronger sense of identity as well. It’s a firm desire in me not to forget and keep the values alive I feel I’m consisted of. I think I’m more and more connected to my past as radical I see change around me. It’s a painful and quite paralyzing process though, and not sure how much it advances me, but these are my building blocks.
ES: During your residency, there was a hosted breakfast where you gave a brief presentation of some of your works, such as Triboluminescence, Welcome to My Dollhouse, and Berlin bhf. It was a very intimate atmosphere, and I found it quite emotional. What led you to select those particular pieces?
AT: BY INVITATION VIENNA was a perfect opportunity to present myself and my portfolio to a larger international group, and I am very grateful to Angela Zach-Buchmayer, who is behind the whole initiative and invited me to participate in the residency. At the presentation, I selected works that correspond to the approach I am working on now, the female psyche, and its transformations. The works you highlighted are from multiple series, and they reflect on various parts of my life and past. My photographic practice generally starts with me merging in an approach I feel most related to at that time. Some themes are recurring, such as childhood, femininity, memories, relationships. Most of my images have a couple layers; the sugar cubes (Triboluminescence) represent nostalgia, they were a typical feature on my grandmother’s coffee table, the structure on the image symbolizes a fragile balance. The word triboluminescence is a phenomenon when light is generated when crystals rubbed or crushed. For me, it represents a transformation, a possibility that broken things can become something new.
Similarly, Welcome to my Dollhouse is also connected to my childhood and to my maternal grandmother. She bought this dollhouse for me in the 80s from a dollar shop, where exciting and luxurious things could be bought for hard currency. Looking back, I think this dollhouse has shaped my spatial and visual perception, I still vividly remember the scenes I played in there. In Berlin bhf. I staged situations that stemmed from personal moments of transitions or rootlessness and combined them with literal references that talk about similar experiences. They are timeless scenes, but set back in time. In most of the pictures, I have also used transcendent elements, something inexplicable or strange as sign of the presence of the emotions.
ES: When you arrive in a new place, such as beginning work in a new studio during a residency, how do you ease into the space? I’m also thinking of objects around your work desk, like the red Lustrafine children’s shoes (bought at Vienna’s Naschmarkt during your first days here).
AT: Spaces and objects are very important for me. For many aspects, it affects my mood, days, and the way I work. For example, I can’t sit down and work if it’s untidy or messy around me. On the other hand, I like to surround myself with objects that intrigue me or give me visual pleasure. This time it was very refreshing to be in a clear new space, without any memory or duty. At first, silence is usually very loud and scary, and then slowly it allows space for new thoughts.
It was the same during this residency as well. Angela and Alex are superhosts and they both made me feel very welcome. Angela introduced me to art professionals, they took me to many cultural gatherings. I found that Vienna has a very active art scene, and I’ve encountered many interesting initiatives, unconventional spaces, interesting approaches and a generally open and curious audience. Being there has broadened my horizon. For example, one day I visited Nives Widauer’s studio, her way of seeing really captured me.
ES: Transgenerational issues, particularly those related to the maternal line, appear frequently in your work. Your mother, for example, is a therapist – has that shaped how you reflect on psychological inheritances?
AT: Surely subconsciously, but joking aside, she is originally a medical doctor, and only later when I was a teenager she started working as a therapist too. Psyche has always fascinated me, but I’m sure seeing these books around, having honest and open conversations helped me to stay curious, while trying to understand my and other’s motivations. I believe what truly shaped how I connect to the world, is mostly her sensitivity and wisdom. I somehow always thought that you have to dig deep and when you find the pain, this is where it starts being interesting. My mother has been the safe surface to return to. Her mother, who we both feel very close to, was very resilient and I feel lucky to inherit some of her genes.
ES: You have a high ability to immerse yourself in very specific moments and details. How do you enter that state of focused attention in your work?
AT: I think I can pick up on details and ephemeral moments in any everyday situations, it’s also quite frequent that I feel I live in a parallel universe. I don’t have a specific technique or routine, but mornings are very important for me to be in silence and start the day slowly from the state of a half-dream state. I also take notes of dreams or extracts from books I read.
ES: How are developed the characters in your works? Thinking, for example, of Black Bird of Hope (2019), Cracked (2019), or Transformation (2018)?
AT: When I form a character, I build her past and state of mind up. I more or less know where she comes from because they are all somewhat related to me, except that I distance them from myself later. The character exhibited at Photo Cluster is based on a painful experience of abuse, betrayal and physical exposure. It’s a story about how to own our body, while accepting vulnerability.
ES: Last time you mentioned that many peers have asked you, “Why don’t you make film instead?”—because of all the work that goes into each of your images. Has film never interested you? I also like the fact that you are not drawn to post-production.
AT: Films have always interested me! In fact, I gain most of my influences and visuals from there. Cinema has hugely shaped my world and my aesthetic. The stories I create are silent frozen films. And somehow this frozen-ness is the key, I guess I’m drawn to stretching moments of everlasting tensions. Photography is capable of expressing this extremely thin line between before and after, transformation without movements. But recently, I have even moved a step closer to moving images. Right exactly in the series that will be on view in Photo Cluster, I worked with sequences and different camera angles. Even though I still chopped the movements up to still frames, they work together to express the transformation my character is going through. The grand series that this exhibition is the first part of, will also include moving images and video works, so who knows when I will end up doing films in parallel to photography. Regarding post-production, I do use it to a very small extent, but not in a way that would compromise the existence of the set-up. It’s psychologically a different experience for me if the situations exist in the physical space. For me, these stories are real, and it’s as almost if the photographic image I take would be a proof of that.
ES: In few days, we can see your work at Photo Cluster Galerie, here in Vienna. The exhibition is entitled Inside A Woman’s Chambers. I was wondering if you could tell why you set Chambers in plural and also how the exhibition has been conceived?
AT: Inside a Woman’s Chambers is the long-term, ongoing project I referred to in your previous question. It has more segments to it, the one I’m showing now in Vienna is the introduction of the series, where I am presenting the first character. The general concept is about showing various parts of a woman going through all sorts of transformation. I started with processing traumas and loss in my life, and exploring how that affected different parts of my personality. Then I got to archetypes, symbols, identity development and researching the transformation of the maternal symbolism, which I all built in the series.
I imagined each character or part of the identity as a room, where you can enter, walk around and by whatever you find in there have a better understanding of her. Chambers is a symbol for the secret compartment that can encapsulate wonderful and horrible things at the same time.
When I met Dino Rekanovic from the gallery and Michael Laubsch at Budapest Art Market in 2024, we started talking about the idea of a collaboration. Photo Cluster represents a strong focus in analogue photography, and I could well imagine a segment of my new series in the gallery’s small and intimate milieu. My stay in Vienna brought me one step closer to realizing the exhibition in terms of connections and ideas. During the residency, I spent time with Angela and talk more about the work in depth. With all these new ideas, we developed the exhibition concept together, and I’m very excited to present the result soon at Photo Cluster!
Exhibition: Anna Tihanyi: Inside A Woman’s Chambers curated by Angela Zach-Buchmayer
Opening: 05.09.2025
Exhibition Duration: 06.09. – 01.10.2025 (Guided tour 13.09.2025)
Location: Photo Cluster Galerie, Zieglergasse 34, 1070 Vienna
Anna Tihanyi – www.begumchat.com, https://www.instagram.com/annatihanyi_photography/
