Truth is Stranger than Fiction

'Truth is Stranger than Fiction' explores the notions of truth, lies and propaganda during the cold war.

I have worked with two different archival holdings at Blinken Open Society Archives (Budapest, Hungary) for this project. The first archival collection is a series of 'field reports' from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute. These are reports collected through interviews with people from or who had access to communist Hungary during the 1950s. The second archival collection consists of amateur photographs from the 1980s. These photographs were discarded by the Hungarian state photographic development company, Főfotó, for technical or political reasons.

The research phase of this project was supported through a Visegrad scholarship. I examined 10.000 photographs from the Private Photo and Film Foundation and 3500 ‘field reports’ from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute.

'Truth is Stranger than Fiction' also exists in the format of the artist's book. The book has a circular structure and offers a non-linear narrative. Two key features characterise the book: "surrealist" texts depict the harshness of daily life when Hungarian communism was at sunrise, while colour photographs are a prelude to its sunset.

Through arrhythmia, I seek to break the reading cadence to question the illustrative function that we assign to the photograph and highlight the ambiguity of the fictitious relationship between images and texts.

The book was shortlisted for the VI Fiebre Dummy Award (Madrid, Spain) in 2021. It was selected among 50 other Belgian photobooks to be showcased at the Rencontres d'Arles 2022: https://vimeo.com/881685603

The project was selected for a Landskrona Foto Residency Bursary - PHMuseum 2023 Photography Grant.

'Truth is Stranger than Fiction' was part of the group show 'Talent Latent' at the SCAN Tarragona Festival 2022. It will also be shown at the Circulation(s) Festival 2024 in Paris.