Veronika Csonka: What has been here all along

The exhibition takes observation as an artistic practice as its point of departure, exploring the ways in which we can connect with nature and the living systems operating around us within a way of life increasingly shaped by urban environments, technology, and mediated experience.

The desire to be close to nature is a familiar experience for many, while the workings of natural environments often remain distant and difficult to perceive. We tend to view plants, bodies of water, and other living systems as one vast backdrop, without paying attention to the subtle, often invisible processes and interactions continuously taking place within them. Rather than seeking the possibility of a romantic return to nature, Veronika Csonka’s work explores how new forms of connection might be established with the living systems of which we ourselves are a part.

One of the exhibition’s personal points of departure is the artist’s family garden in Zamárdi, which has been part of her family’s life for generations. While the garden once primarily served as a site of daily sustenance and care, for Csonka it has become a space of memory and an important point of connection with nature. This inspired to the creation of a sensor-based object designed to record various natural processes, which operated in the garden before the exhibition. The built-in sensors monitored and recorded different environmental parameters, revealing processes that would otherwise remain largely invisible to everyday observation. In this case, technology does not replace the experience of nature, rather, it extends our attention, attempting to transform a physically distant place into a continuously changing system unfolding before our eyes.

This approach to technology shapes the exhibition as a whole. Microscopic images, specimens, biological structures, measurement data, and slow biochemical processes are not presented as scientific illustrations, but rather as starting points through which various ways of observing nature become tangible. The paintings and objects are partly based on the artist’s microscopic observations, which are reflected in her use of materials that evokes laboratory environments. The abstract, organic forms appearing on the canvases evoke a sense of both the familiar and the alien, in which beauty and strangeness, order and decay are equally present.

However, our connection does not have to occur exclusively through scientific or technological means. Observing a closed ecosystem, caring for plants, or even the biological processes taking place in the kitchen are all everyday situations in which humans are not merely observers but active participants in living systems. Direct experience and technological tools therefore offer different possibilities for bringing us closer to the processes unfolding around us. At the same time, the question arises as to how our relationship to something changes when we begin to perceive structures within it that that were previously invisible.

The exhibition What has been here all along does not focus on the question of defining nature. Rather, it highlights the tools we use to try to understand nature and how observation itself shapes our relationship with it. The exhibition follows the stages of the artist’s own attempts at reconnecting, while also offering viewers the opportunity to get closer to the systems that surround us. Through her works, Veronika Csonka does not propose a return to a lost, idealised nature, but instead invites us to recognise that the possibility of connection may never have disappeared entirely, we simply need to learn to notice what has been here all along.