© Anita Horváth
Welcome to European Kinship: Eastern European Perspective, a special editorial project marking an exhibition of the same name at the Capa Center
All images © Anita Horváth.
Anita Horváth
You Are Not Like Them
Growing up in Polgárdi, a small town in central Hungary with mixed Roma/Hungarian heritage, Anita Horváth faced many challenges around identity and ethnicity, asked if she was a gypsy, told she had ‘bad blood’, and even insulted by being called a ‘gypsy whore’. She went on to make work circling around her lived experiences and, while studying for a Photography MA at Moholy-Nagy University of Arts, started an ongoing project You Are Not Like Them, linking her personal perspective with wider questions around the position of Roma women in Hungary. Speaking with her peers, Horváth realised the same words and phrases had been levelled at all of them, by authority figures such as teachers and doctors as well as by classmates and even strangers. “Every minority group struggles with the fact that representation is shaped by the majority of the society,” she notes, and in her portraits she aims to both poke fun at the stereotypes and push for self-determination. From experiencing her mixed heritage as an uncertainty, and being caught between cultures without fully belonging to anything, she now believes identity is multi-layered and enriching.
All images © Ilona Szwarc.
Ilona Szwarc
I am a woman and I feast on memory
Born in Warsaw, Poland, Ilona Szwarc is now based in Los Angeles, and holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University. Her work explores identity, transformation, and the dopplegänger, informed by her experience of being an immigrant – and of being a woman. In I am a woman and I feast on memory she works with models who physically resemble her, assuming the role of makeup artist and taking tips from professional stage makeup tutorials to suggest them as entirely new characters. As a migrant she stands outside the dominant order, immersed in her own process of becoming, she argues – but adds that, as a woman, it is also in her nature to engage in a perpetual process of creation, “turning the self into an experiment in reproduction”. Working at the intersection of painting, cinema and theatre, Szwarc adopts a directorial role in this series, and often a male identity, to test the nature of authority and wrestle power for herself. I am a woman and I feast on memory also draws on childhood experiences and cultural memories to explore how women inhabit their bodies and domestic spaces, recollections moulded by male consciousness but reconstituted by feminism.
European Kinship is on show at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest, from 12 March 2025.
This article first appeared in a special project of the same name, published alongside BJP Issue 7921 and co-organized with the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest and with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the international cultural program of the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, 2025.
The project was co-financed by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
