Artist-in-Residency, VEB 2023
House of Arts Veszprém/ Dubniczay Palace
2023.06.29. – 2023.08.27.

British artist Dafna Talmor is one of the participating artists in the international Balaton Eye artist-in-residency programme. She was invited by curator Claudia Küssel, who organizes several exhibitions as part of ECoC 2023 on behalf of the House of Arts Veszprém. Dafna Talmor’s practice is built upon her fascination with landscape, one of the classic genres of photography. However, her approach is anything but classic and is in fact difficult to fit into the photographic tradition. Her work has a strong contemporary visual appearance and aesthetics, which are not easy to compare to other photographic practices today.

During her residency, Dafna Talmor has explored the specific treasures and natural particularities of the landscape in the Balaton region such as Úrkút Paleokarst Nature Reserve, Római Fürdő in Bakonynána, the nature trails of the Tihany Peninsula, the Basalt Organs in Kisapát and Hegyestű. With a strong fascination for photographic representation of elements such as bodies of water and rock formations, she visited several basalt formations of the volcanic landscape, forests with streams and hidden caves, and, of course, the lake itself. The numerous photographs she took were the impetus for new work and photographs produced by collaging negatives, which will be presented in a variety of forms at the House of Arts/ Dubniczay Palace.

Dafna Talmor is an interdisciplinary artist and lecturer based in London. Since 2009 she has been working on an ongoing project entitled Constructed Landscapes. In this project, she has developed a very particular way of working, on the one hand very much rooted in the tradition of analog photography, while on the other hand, challenging and questioning its conventions. The work revolves around experimentation in the darkroom with the negatives themselves, which she cuts and combines with other negatives to create new imaginary landscapes. In her most recent work, she further breaks with the traditional format of the photographic frame, splitting the frame into diptychs, triptychs and producing 3D objects.

With Constructed Landscapes, Dafna is pushing the boundaries of the photographic medium, not only in the way she’s treating it but also in her approach to her main subject which is the landscape genre. Questioning the notion of the single perspective in Western pictorial conventions, she extends the concept of the landscape as we have learned to see it. In its complexity of layers, she creates a body of work of extremes that results in a rich and multilayered visual language in which the process is as important as the final result. Her new work will be responding to the local landscape as well as the architecture of the exhibition space at the House of Arts/ Dubniczay Palace.

Dafna Talmor is represented by TOBE Gallery in Budapest and Sid Motion Gallery in London.
She was recently awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society in the UK.

The exhibition is curated by Claudia Küssel

Graphic design by De_form Studio

All installation photos by Dávid Biró