Korniss Péter: Transition
Mirbach Palace, Bratislava (SK)
31. October – 13. January 2019
Peter Korniss’ exhibition recalls the fate of traditional peasant culture and its people from the past fifty years.
The photographs in the first room were taken of the seemingly untouched peasant world, which the photographer encountered in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily in Transylvania, Romania. The first portion of his work focuses on capturing this world that was destined to disappear. In his pictures the happiness of making a new discovery and the freshness of a photojournalist are equally present.
The photographs in the second room represent the changes in the rural areas. Starting in 1989 after the collapse of the Eastern-European dictatorships, the lives of people in the villages changed in an irreversible way. Korniss’ photos also depict the spread of globalization. Here, we come face-to-face with arranged pictures, symbolizing the photographer’s need to bring order to his photos to enhance their messages to viewers.
In the third room, we can see Korniss’ works from recent years. These photos show Transylvanian women who work in Budapest, far from their homes: they clean apartments, care for the elderly, or sell their folk art items. They are in fact guest workers – this is how the new series relates to one of Korniss’ earlier projects titled The Guest Worker, which was exhibited in Bratislava in 2002. These pictures show the changed photographic attitude: they show the sign of conceptual thinking.
This half-century encompassing exhibition not only follows the continuity of history butalso shows the change in Korniss’ work over time.
