Sunday

The seventh day of the week is for rest—to sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor. I look around, but my satisfaction freezes into uneasiness. The man-made landscape under the indifferent sky seems to be transforming into a mere memory at this very moment. In my photo series, I explore the emotional dimension of global uncertainty, beyond the necessary alternation and competition of the religious, cultural, and political ideologies that have increasingly defined public discourse in recent decades. Although signs have pointed to this for half a century, we are only slowly reaching a consensus about the unsustainability of our modern lifestyle. The vision of a self-consuming mankind and impending doom has become a popular topic in the media, providing fertile ground for the imagination of those seeking a way out. A recurring desire is to slow down—to create a society not centered on accumulating material things. After all, a gear shift in our everyday life was brought about by the pandemic and its subsequent emergency brakes. This phenomenon offers several lessons for the future, but above all, it reveals our economic and emotional vulnerability. In the ensuing silence, some people, for the first time, allow themselves a day of rest and time with family. Yet as time sheds its familiar skin, it leaves others in a painful vacuum, with aimless, amorphous days following one another. This contrast speaks most clearly about the maze called civilization that we have built around ourselves. When I look around, it seems my environment regains a new consciousness—as if liberated from the flurry of its creators. The world is finally free to observe itself and those who brought it into being, now huddled in their rooms. In the ocean of cosmic time, the thought of failure suddenly loses gravity; after all, it is rooted in a humankind with only a slender thread of history. In this tense yet exceptional moment, we have the opportunity to show acceptance and sympathy for our own smallness—and extraordinary uniqueness.

Máté Bartha (1987), is a Budapest-based visual artist. He graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) in 2011 with a Master’s degree in photography, and in 2016 from the University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest, majoring in Documentary Filmmaking. Máté Bartha’s artistic practice is driven by a mission to reenchant the world through world-building and impersonation. His work constructs new narratives by blending symbolic and subjective interpretations of the metropolis, treating urban spaces as arenas for imaginative transformation.