THIS ROOM WILL SURVIVE ME
-PH21 Gallery Budapest, opening remarks
Jane Ross, Photographer (London)
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to help open your latest exhibition, but most of all thank you very much for introducing me and many others to the work of Cindy Konits.
The PH21 gallery is a wonderful platform and catalyst for showing photographers vision to new audiences not only in Hungary but across the world.
Cindy’s beautiful series This Room will Survive Me is infused with poetry: the photographs powerfully evoke the shifts of time and place in our memories.
Above all, this powerful series reminds us of the possibilities that photography gives us to capture the essence of time, of time lost, time remembered, time imagined or time re-imagined.
Like all good photographers Cindy is showing us a feeling and a spirit that we cannot easily put into words. They are works of meditation. When we look at these images we are reminded that houses and their surrounding spaces hold the essence and spirit of those who have inhabited them. Walls in particular carry the weight and imprint of past lives and hold layers of memories - the successes and failures, joys and sorrows, and many stories of their past owners. Walls absorb children’s laughter, adult happiness, grief..and all the milestones of lost souls.
Above all, by placing herself in these sensuous photographs, Cindy has captured the sense that traces of the past do live on in the present…. and surround us.
Finally, I believe that I and many others can return again and again to individual images or the series, This Room Will Survive Me, as a whole….not only to reflect on their aesthetic beauty but also their intrinsic poetry.
July 29, 2021