On nuclear pasts
and radiant futures
Logo: SALT.CLAY.ROCK.
Artistic research
and exhibition

Csilla Nagy & Rita Süveges

CSILLA NAGY
Csilla Nagy is a visual artist based in Galanta, Slovakia. Her practice is characterised by a search for ways and means of remembering. She often thematises the different layers and fragmented nature of memory, whether individual, family or collective. In recent years she has become interested in ceramics, integrating it into her artistic practice. She uses clay in conceptual and experimental ways, trying out ancient techniques or new methods, digging deep in the history of ceramics and exploring the latest technological approaches. She was awarded the Derkovits Grant, Visegrad Scholarship and Art scholarship of the Hungarian Academy in Rome. Since 2018 she is an Assistant Professor at J. Selye University, Komárno, Slovakia. https://www.csilla.xyz/

RITA SÜVEGES
Rita Süveges is a visual artist based in Budapest. Her practice is research-based, she works with communities through knowledge-sharing performative events, and for a white cube context she uses a wide range of installative media. Suveges's main topics are rooted in the ecological and climate crisis, her aims to repoliticize these issues into a societal understanding through the imaginative power of art. She is enrolled in the Doctor of Liberal Arts program of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. In her upcoming dissertation, she is questioning geoengineering and techno-optimism from a feminist perspective.

She was awarded the TÓTalJOY Award, Smohay Award, Derkovits Grant, New National Excellence Grant, Visegrad Scholarship, and was nominated for the Strabag and the Esterhazy Art Award.

She took part in residency programs in Cité des Arts de Paris, ISCP New York, Meetfactory Prague, MQ/Q21 AIR Vienna, Balatorium, Künstlerdorf Schöppingen etc. Having several solo and group shows in Hungary, in the international context she exhibited in Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Off–Biennale Budapest and Collegium Hungaricum Berlin among others.

She is also a co-founder of xtro realm artist group, which since 2017 organizes reading circles, exhibitions, field trips dealing with the ecological theories that critique the anthropocentrism of contemporary thinking. She was an editor, author and designer of extrodæsia – Encyclopedia Towards a Post-Anthropocentric World, and the Climate Imaginary Reader. Süveges was a curator of ACLIM! part of OFF–Biennale Budapest 2021. She was also a board member of the Association of Studio of Young Artists between 2018–2021.
http://www.ritasuveges.com/

Csilla Nagy and Rita Süveges at their OVERCOMING TIME artist led field-trip in Boda Hungary

Csilla Nagy and Rita Süveges devised an artist-led field trip as part of SALT. CLAY. ROCK., inviting the audience to a performative-participatory gathering and communal pit-firing session to Boda, a possible site for Hungary’s final repository for high-level radioactive waste. Using this ancient technique to transform clay into ceramics, the artists created shapes and objects inspired by the nuclear fuel rods, which will be stored in the final repository. Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of "nuclear semiotics", they ask how we can imagine communication with future generations about the location and the toxicity of the nuclear waste repository.