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The work is a bowl shaped after the contours of the Pannonian Sea, inscribed with a quotation from Emanuele Coccia’s The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Nature: “the absence of hands is not a sign of lack but rather the consequence of the restless immersion in the very matter they ceaselessly model.” The book, dedicated to the philosophy of plants, describes how vegetal life produces the very environment in which it exists, realizing a state of total permeability in which body and world are inseparable.

Inside the bowl, Parajd rock salt and water form a saline solution that slowly crystallizes. Over the course of several days, the growing salt gradually obscures the inscribed text until it disappears entirely beneath the crystalline surface. The work thus stages a process in which meaning is not preserved but metabolized by material itself.

This slow erasure resonates with Timothy Morton’s concept of dark ecology, in which nature is no longer an idealized, transparent system but an entangled, unsettling field where beauty, loss, and damage coexist. The bowl does not present nature as a stable ground or a harmonious backdrop, but as a process that absorbs, overwrites, and exceeds human language and intention.

The work has acquired an additional and unintended layer of meaning in light of the flooding that occurred in Parajd at the end of May 2025, when salt—normally a marker of preservation—became vulnerable to dissolution and loss. In this context, the crystallizing and erasing text becomes a quiet memorial to ecological instability, reminding us that material processes operate beyond symbolic control, and that immersion in matter is never without consequence.

Artworks made between 2024-2026 related to salt.

rövid leírás

Csön-csön gyűrű / Chime-chime ring – Hungarian children’s song

How do you find someone who does not want to be found, when every circumstance is against it? Someone who does not want to be found leaves very few traces.

In the film Éva A-5116 (1963, directed by László Nádasy), we see Éva Kroz, a medical student at the University of Krakow. She speaks Polish, a language she learned from her foster parents, and she does not know her biological parents. She was two or three years old when she was adopted in the village of Auschwitz, unaware of her own name and unable to remember her parents. The only thing revealed by the number tattooed on her arm is that she arrived at the concentration camp on a transport from Hungary. Like everyone else, she wants to know who her parents were, whether they are still alive. For this reason, she turns to the Hungarian authorities to search for any surviving relatives. Newspaper advertisements appear in Hungary, and dozens of people come forward, believing they recognize in Éva their daughter, sister, niece, or relative. Éva travels to Hungary to undergo the necessary examinations. The documentary Örök Éva (Hungarian, 2006, directed by László Nádasy Jr.) tells the story of her attempt to uncover her “ancestry” using the new DNA technology.

The final scene of Örök Éva was the starting point for my work. We see Éva Kroz sitting on a couch, holding a letter. An official decision: the DNA test did not detect any familial relationship. She did not find her blood relatives. Éva recounts that she had not really hoped for a result, and then tells how, during the filming, a young girl gave her a ring that she had received from her own mother, to bring her luck. Upon returning home, Éva felt guilty, questioning whether it was right to accept the gift, since it had value for the girl. She wanted to reciprocate, and then remembered: she herself had a ring, brought from Auschwitz as a small child. She sent this ring to the girl in Hungary in exchange.

Éva’s ring has been in the possession of a 19-year-old girl in 2006, who is now 31, somewhere in Pilis. It is in a house with a stone, vaulted cellar entrance in its yard, and across the street are two wooden crosses turned sideways, with a coat of arms. The inscription on the coat of arms is illegible. These were the only clues to locate the girl.

I began my search for Éva’s ring a month ago. I relied on multiple sources. From an interview with the director, I learned that the ring is with a woman who most likely lived in Pilisvörösvár—at least at the time of the ring’s handover, she still resided there. The director provided me with the film footage, showing the girl receiving the ring, though her name does not appear. Students from Kossuth Zsuzsa High School participated in the filming both in 1964 and in 2006. The girl was 19 during the filming of the second part. However, the school merged with Raul Wallenberg High School in 2009, and its archival documents were lost during multiple relocations. Former teachers now barely remember their former students.

Meanwhile, I began planning what I would create using the motif of the ring and the hand: an open pair of hands, showing the owner’s handprint (positive form) with the ring inside, modeled after the ring Éva had given. The ring in the hand is divided into two parts as a casting mold: one half engraved in the left hand, the other in the right. The ring becomes whole, actualized, only when the hands are joined. In this way, the ring exists, but it is not visible.

I want to reflect on the obscurity and hidden existence of memory—on the times when people could not publicly claim their cultural identity and could only preserve it secretly, amid doubt. The story of the ring is also important, how through touch it carries the fate of the people who hold it.

After a long and unsuccessful search, I made a final attempt by taking a virtual walk through Pilisvörösvár on Google Maps, hoping to spot the sideways crosses somewhere. I hesitated to visit the town in person, and gradually realized that I no longer wanted to find her. If this monument is about the existence of a ring, which Éva preserved for years and then gave to this girl, and if this ring serves as a memento pointing to the secrets and doubts that characterized Jewish communities in Hungary in the 1960s, then the ring must remain unfound.

The search is therefore concluded, but the thread of memory has not been severed—it has been turned inward. The monument’s impersonality reflects the historical period it processes. It represents the era’s anonymous witnesses, faceless keepers of secrets. Indeed, the “Jewish question” existed, only in a more concealed form than before or after. The handing over of the ring occurred, and the memory lives on. Let this monument be dedicated to the act of giving, for the essence lies in the continuity of memory—not tied to a single person or case, but to all who share in it, regardless of their individual life stories.

This work was realized as part of the Enyészpontok 3.0 project curated by Tamás Don. More information can be found at the following link:

https://enyeszpontok.hu/2021/10/30/szabo-nora-cson-cson-gyuru-hungarian-childrens-song/

How can we create a true image of ourselves today? In this question, every word matters — even the “today,” as Miklós Erdély would add. Let us start from the middle. “Today” in this case means the era in which, if Walter Benjamin were alive, the concept of technical reproducibility would likely make him think first of self-representation. Our age is that of mirrors built into phones, the era of self-portraits. We reproduce our faces and body parts endlessly on social media. We have our profiles and silhouettes liked. We look at ourselves through webcams. We continuously record and share the images of our motorized movements, our running data. Our monitoring devices store every gesture; our computer use can be followed as if in a diary. Today.
If we remove this one word, what remains is “How can we create a true image of ourselves?” And immediately we reach the next word: “of ourselves.” Naturally, this must be understood together with “create,” otherwise we get lost among the meanings. If the emphasis were rather on “ourselves,” we would have to consider that nowadays it is increasingly rare for someone else to hold the camera — and even more unimaginable that, for example, a man in a suit would drag a woman dipped in paint across a sheet of paper spread on the floor. But let us draw a veil over the past and emphasize the “create” instead.

In the making of the self-portrait, time can be traced more precisely than ever before. Every self-portrait joins thousands of other portraits of ourselves — which can not only be retrieved but are sometimes brought up by Facebook through an algorithm, even without our asking. The time between portraits condenses, almost cancels itself out. The images are no longer unique portraits but sequences that can be strung together into the moving picture of our lives. Any image made “of ourselves” — whether a painting, a sculpture, or a photogram — cannot be separated from the transformation of technical reproduction, from the continuous shrinking of time embedded in portraits. Yet, in essence, the portrait remains the same as ever: we always age relative to a painting, photograph, sculpture, or imprint made at a certain moment — unlike the case of Dorian Gray.

Speaking of Dorian Gray, we are reminded of a sharp boundary: the boundary between life and death. The difference between an imprint made of the living and a death mask. But with that, we have also finished with the word “ourselves”; “create” remains as an auxiliary verb.

How can we create a true image? This question leads to another: to what extent can an image still be called true? If we create our likeness, how much can it still resemble the vera icon, the “true image,” after which, through a linguistic misunderstanding, Veronica was named? From today’s perspective, perhaps we can only say that we can no longer speak of a true image. Or more precisely: Pauer’s pseudo has already said everything about this.

So from the sentence only one word remains: “how.”
Nóra Szabó’s works are about the how. In the first sense, about uncertainty: how?
A girl lay naked on the floor, spread a rolled-out sheet of paper over herself, and then painted her own body. She did not make an imprint, but with rhythmic arm movements covered herself with paint. She did this many times, perhaps searching for the best image.

The “how” speaks of the arm’s-length of a selfie. Of how it is possible, in an age when technical reproducibility is inescapable, to make a frottage. Of how it is possible to create an image of oneself that is simultaneously visible and invisible — that is, with a single painterly gesture, to conceal and reveal the body.

Nóra Szabó’s images are not mere costumes but could rather be called body masks. They conceal and reveal their creator. In this case, we cannot speak of a true self-portrait, since the result is essentially an abstraction — from the images, we cannot recognize the artist’s actual body. We do not see her face; her figure is blurred. We know who might be behind the images only from the context — the stories. The sequence of revealing and concealing arranges itself into time, yet at once becomes timeless. The same always follows, timelessly.

Thus, in these works, there are always two answers to the “how”: visible and concealed, known and unknowable, within time and beyond time. Such duality is adequate to an era — to today — when a true image is no longer possible. When an imprint can be neither purely erotic nor purely religious, for it would be kitsch. It cannot be merely realistic or solely abstract, for these categories can no longer be understood in the old way. It cannot be individual, nor can it be universal. It cannot be sharply one kind of thing, because we ourselves are no longer like that. Today, there is no other way to create a true image of ourselves.

This might seem to close the thought, as we have returned to the original question. But there is still something else. From Miklós Erdély’s sentence —
let us recall it: “Every word in this sentence is important, even the even” — there remains the even. There is still something more we have forgotten. For we are standing in a catacomb, surrounded by paintings lifted from the ground and displayed upright, unrolled. The painter of the images does not lie on the paper but under it, hidden by it; at first it looks as though she were dead. Yet if we imagine her working, we can know that to paint her legs she must have sat up. And in sitting up, she suddenly becomes alive — for indeed, it could not be otherwise: no one can cast their own death mask.

Looking through the translucent paper, at the boundary between visible and invisible, the body appears both dead and alive. But where does the body end? As far as our arm can still reach? As long as we can swim in one breath? As far as we can still spit? As far as our sight still extends? As long as our voice can still carry?

— Exhibition opening text by József Mélyi (English translation)

“I cannot see it, I do not know it, I may not touch it.” – Oscar Wilde, The Fisherman and his Soul

What we see here is a dual attention directed both inward, toward one’s own center, and outward, toward the world—an attention divided by an insurmountable threshold, a boundary of inside and outside, marked by the skin. Blind groping, and the traces of that groping. The imprints of the first moment of realization, showing that the boundary between inside and outside can be separated, pierced. The realization that the skin has been torn and fallen into fragments renders all further groping meaningless: behind it there is nothing, only the other half of the same gaze, which can at most immerse itself in itself.

In her body-objects, Nóra Szabó explores the perception of one’s own body and, in a way, the consciousness that monitors this perception—ultimately addressing the problem of the blurred boundaries between body and self-awareness.

— Text by András Szücs (English translation)

The body is in our possession, but it changes from minute to minute. We can never stay the same, and it is equally true that we cannot change from moment to moment. Our physical presence is changing in life, and with the outside, our inner character is changing. The object of examination is the body, but it is useless to know who it is because, although recognizable now, it will not be later. Then it will only be important to have a body. Picture of a woman, a woman’s idea. The painter paints his hands and presses them onto a piece of paper. Every detail is important, what you wear, what you say, how you feel and think, but as soon as you lift your hand from the paper, the individual disappears and becomes foggy and the image of the imprint remains.