Miklós Surányi: Photo series

Miklós Surányi returns to his topics found during his exploratory city walks and portrays everyday – yet seemingly unusual or even set up – situations with a conscious compositional attitude. His photos are visual journal excerpts with a strange ambiance, which have been grouped into series (Stand Still, Unconditional Reflex, Transitional), and whose pieces he reselects from time to time.

In his Stand Still series, he maps the peripheral areas of the contemporary urban environment as well as those places, which have been robbed of their urban function and the life that was originally meant to fill them. These border territories are “no man’s lands” between public and private areas, which have lost their earlier functions and, thus, have transformed into a different environment. The once busy spaces have become abandoned and melancholy. The mysterious ambiance is enhanced – and the limits of the viewer’s imagination are stretched – by the “role casting” and the composed scenes, which serve to periodically populate the spaces. Surányi writes: “I organize mini tourist groups to these places. I mostly invite people here who have never met before and have never been to the given location. The photos made here are, therefore, unusual tourist shots. I would like to present these found spaces through positioning people in the landscape… This temporary use induces a different view of these locations…” Even by virtue of its title, Stand Still makes references to classical landscape-genre painting, not only in the technique it employs but also by the position of the documented locations, which is independent of time and geographical coordinates.

The pieces of Unconditional Reflex feature apparently ordinary, insignificant and indistinctive things. The seemingly standard situations sometimes turn into absurd, manmade, extreme scenarios. The, at first glance, humorously farcical situations, thanks to the documentation style of this attentive and sensitive artist, transforms into a poetic etudes.

Miklós Surányi graduated from the Intermedia Program of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2002. Presently, he is a Pécsi József photography scholar.

Simultaneously with his show at kArton, Miklós Surányi also has an exhibition with Támasz Sáska at the Lumen Gallery, on view until 5 March 2007.

Miklós Surányi's webpage: www.snap.hu