Sky and Water Embrace by Anna Kereszty

Az ég a vízzel összeér | Sky and Water Embrace by Anna Kereszty (HU)

Opening remarks by Anna Sidó, curator and museologist.

September 4 – 14, 2024

TOBE Gallery | Budapest, Hungary

Balatonlelle. Train whistle from the small station. Home of eternal vacation, refuge of timelessness. Our house in Lelle was built in 1927, my great-grandparents bought the land in 1905. Different generations of the family spent entire summers here and survived the Second Great War here.
At that time, in front of the little house, there were vineyards all the way to the white sandy shore. Today there are six other houses in the street between the waterfront and our garden. The wilderness has been replaced by parceling the little path with a paved road, the sheltering little bay changed to a public beach. Everything has changed, yet everything remains the same.
We bathe, we laugh, we play, we fight, we dream, we remember. The house is a witness and keeper of our stories: births, swinging, ping-pong matches, cherry eating, growing up, romances, family troubles, and war. My sister and me, my mother and her sister, my grandmother and her sister, my great-grandmother and her sister. Mothers, daughters, small and big sisters. And the mother of us all is Lake Balaton.
A family bond. A long thread, a bubble that inflates and then bursts. As the amniotic sac in the mother’s belly breaks and the water flows away. Just as nicely warm as the water of Lake Balaton on an August day. This house is my bubble, my shell. A place where time passes in a different way, where the stillness of constancy floats through the air. A place where the environment is constantly changing, a garden where ancient trees tell stories, a lake whose water has magical powers.
According to Béla Hamvas, the moment is never without a place, and a place without a moment. The two are linked by fate, because it is fate that is both space and time, both inside and outside.
The photographs of the family archive, like missing fragments of a mystery, link the past to the present.
Just as the “golden bridge” over Lake Balaton (the reflection of the setting sun on the water’s surface) connects the two shores, so I am searching the passage between past and present. I imagine that this ray of light, which appears on the surface of the water every sunset, opens a path to where the ancestors dwell. Visible yet intangible, recurrent yet unrepeatable, eternal yet ever-changing. Dreamlike, yet true.

Press

• Kereszty Anna: Az ég a vízzel összeér / PUNKT