Ornella Mari // Abbronzatissima

On our first exhibition held at Textilgyár, we present Ornella Mari's street (beach?) photographs, which she has been taking since 2020 at Lake Balaton, as well as on the beaches of Zurich, Brussels and Naples. The locations depicted in the images are all close to the artist, she regularly visits her relatives who live here. During the summers spent on various beaches, she began capturing photos and videos of beachgoers and people (sometimes animals) connected to the shore in some way. As the series evolved, the photographer became increasingly interested in blurring the boundaries between these important venues of her life. Through her photographs, she depicts the essence of beachgoing as a particular state of being — independent of space and time. She views beachgoers as a distinctive caste that transcends nationalities. As a result, the majority of the images are intentionally ambiguous, making it difficult to determine where they were taken — which, in the artist's perspective, is entirely irrelevant anyway.

Ornella Mari (1996) is a Belgian-born, Hungarian-Italian photographer based in Budapest. After completing her studies in sociology, she earned her master's degree in photography at MOME. She began working with photography in 2017 to explore her identity – particularly in terms of her relationship to femininity and womanhood. Mari’s work focuses on self-analysis and surpassing her own boundaries, as well as unrealistic expectations set by society, questions of femininity and trauma processing. Her diploma work and personal project Through hardship to the stars was selected by Futures Photography in 2023.

After the opening, Balázs Pándi will be DJing in the downstairs bar.

The exhibition was sponsored by utazom.com.