Transgenerational Trauma in Eastern Europe
17 January 2022 - Written by PhMuseum
Three Colours I Know in This World by Kincső Bede looks at the effects that Socialism produced across the former generations in Eastern Europe, while illustrating how tensions are still present within local communities today, on both personal and collective levels.
The starting point of Kincso Bede's work is, on one hand, the ever-present and eternal dilemma: how can generations with different historical experiences live together and collaborate within the family and communities, in a broader sense. The other is to confront and deal with the legacy of socialism, that unspoken historical past which creates tensions within Eastern European societies in a radically changed socio-economic and personal context.
She responds to the issues that interest and affect us all deeply with a mode of expression and formal language characteristic of her generation, while evoking at the same time topos of cultural history in a very authentic way, creating an individual mythology. She approaches her subject boldly and concisely to present the ambivalent relationship of children to their parent's traumas, while also giving personal insight into old and new problems.
It is reassuring to see how even the most brutal phenomena become dusty and banal over time, while we can observe with some scepticism that even though each generation gives birth to another, each of them somehow closes in on its problems.
Words and Pictures by Kincso Bede.
Kincso Bede (b. 1995) is a Romanian visual artist with Hungarian roots, who grew up in a small city in Transylvania. She is fascinated by the communist past of herhomeland, the power of the leader Ceausescu, the control exercised by thesecurity agency Securitate, and how this history is passed down across thegenerations. Follow her on Instagram and PhMuseum.
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This feature is part of Story of the Week, a selection of relevant projects from our community handpicked by the PhMuseum curators.