Tell me about your Future, I Show you my Past – Tim Rod’s solo exhibition
2025. Sep. 26. - 2025. Nov. 16.
Since its opening, the MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art’s Project Space has served as a platform for young and emerging artists at the beginning of their careers. This time, in collaboration with the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, it is hosting a solo exhibition by Swiss photographer Tim Rod (1992).
Photography, which guarantees irreplaceable uniqueness and unrepeatable singularity, preserves its subject by simultaneously removing it from the order of time, thus imbuing it with a sense of loss and inaccessibility. How, if at all, can someone’s presence be conveyed through absences? Are the spirit of a place, the landscapes and objects seen in the images capable of hauntingly (re)ferring to a past that can only be guessed at but is completely elusive? What do the findings of field surveys and archive data reveal about a person? How can a portrait be drawn or redrawn from these traces?
The exhibition Tell me about your Future, I Show you my Past addresses these questions related to memory, identity, and personal family history, among others. Tim Rod’s compilation is primarily an attempt to rearrange and present, through various photo documentations, photo collages, and collections of objects, the fragments of memory that refer to his late great-great-grandfather, Ludwig Stein (1859–1930), who was born in Erdőbénye and raised in the surrounding area. Although Stein spent most of his life abroad, as a Hungarian Jewish philosopher he remained closely connected to Hungary, and his ideas on improving society and his diplomatic activities were entirely devoted to serving his former homeland and the Jewish people. The artist began his efforts in this direction, that is, dealing with his great-great-grandfather’s past, during this year’s Capa Center FUTURES residency program, which was based on site visits and archival research. The exhibition is the first stage of this ongoing project, which primarily demonstrates that memory based on testimonies and counter-signatures is inherently and continuously permeated by imagination, and that evocation or recollection is the only authentic form of restoring and recovering a lost or inaccessible past, a prerequisite for our understanding of ourselves and the world.
Curator: Edward Kovács
Co-curator: Balázs Som