Eszter Sipos

Eszter Sipos graduated from Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Budapest) in visual teaching department (2004-2008). She graduated from Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Budapest) in painting department (2002-2007). In the year 2007 she studied at the Glasgow School of Art (Scotland) in painting and printmaking department. She won several art prizes: Smohay Pize (2014), Gyula Derkovits Scholarship (2009-2011), STRABAG Painting Prize - creative support (2008), Essl Award -Special prize (in 2007), Ludwig Prize (2005). In 2016 Eszter took part in the Korea – V4 Young Professionals Exchange Program in South-Korea (Seoul). She started DLA Program (PHD Program for artists) in 2015 in the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Budapest).  

Her artworks takes critical view of social, political and cultural issues. She often reflects on recent Hungarian history and the Cold War – in relation to other Eastern European countries.The collisions of subjective and collective memory are also recurring elements in her projects. As an artist, she began to engage with the stories surrounding sites that have been significantly transformed over the past 70 years, roughly since World War II. She is carrying out research along the following themes: The effects of industrialisation and later globalisation on micro-communities; The transformation of urban and rural landscapes as a result of political power; and The transformation of community spaces. Her current project, “The Invisible Factory”, deals with Cold War memory by way of the sites of the era (bunkers, factories, and the built environment). She began engaging with this subject in 2014, and since the summer of 2016, She has been working on it together with Csaba Árpád Horváth. Her work, The Invisible Factory, reflects on the recent past, politics of memory, and its controversial relationship with the actual experiences, through the history of the transformation of an underground ammunition factory in Hungary. The project commenced with an approach quite close to activism, but due to the secrecy of the subject, and the difficulty in gaining access to the site, they turned to a more lyrical direction. They confronted three positions: that of theirs generation; that of those who had formerly worked there; and the point-of-view of those who live there. They examine the potential for permeability between these three positions.

http://esztersipos.tumblr.com/