Kincső Bede (b.1995)
She’s a Romanian visual artist with Hungarian roots, who grew up in a small city in Transylvania, Romania. She is fascinated by the communist past of her homeland, the power of the leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, the control exercised by the security agency Securitate, and how this history is passed down across the generations. Currently, Kincső lives and works in Budapest, Hungary and she is studied at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. She is part of the Studio of Young Photographers. In 2020 she won the photography scholarship of the Association of Hungarian Photographers. In the same year she was among the winners of Carte Blanche Students, a scholarship founded by Paris Photo. The works of the four winners were exhibited at the Parisian Gare du Nord. Her diploma series, titled ’’Three Colours I Know in This World’’ was chosen for the 10 New Talent 2020 programme by the curators of BredaPhoto Festival and was exhibited in The Netherlands. Her work is ogten applauded by the foreign press. Also, her photos are part of the Blurring the Lines 2020 issue. From 2020 she is represented by TOBE Gallery, in Budapest. After a year, in 2021 she was exhibited at UNSEEN, in Amsterdam, and in Paris, at Paris Photo’s Curiosa sector with TOBE Gallery, curated by Shoair Mavlian.
Three Colours I Know in This World (2019-2021)
The starting point of Bede Kincső’s work is, on one hand, the ever-present and eternal dilemma: how can generations with different historical experiences live together and collaborate within the family and communities, in a broader sense. The other is to confront and deal with the legacy of socialism, that unspoken historical past which creates tensions within Eastern European societies in a radically changed socio-economic and personal context. She responds to the issues that interest and affect us all deeply with a mode of expression and formal language characteristic of her generation, while evoking at the same time topos of cultural history in a very authentic way, creating an individual mythology. She approaches her subject boldly and concisely to present the ambivalent relationship of children to their parents’ traumas, while also giving personal insight into old and new problems. It is reassuring to see how even the most brutal phenomena become dusty and banal over time, while we can observe with some scepticism that even though each generation gives birth to another, each of them somehow closes in on its problems.
– by Spengler Katalin
