About
Nóra Fanni Zentay
visual artist & lecturer-researcher in film studies
contact email:
zentayartdesign@gmail.com
Bio
Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1987.
Nóra Fanni Zentay is a Hungarian visual artist and researcher working with analog graphic printmaking, experimental, alternative photographic printing techniques and intermedia/video art.
She studied visual art and film studies and developed her interest in both fields. She holds an MA in Film Studies from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE, Hungary) and completed the Doctoral Programme in Film, Media and Contemporary Culture. Currently she is a PhD candidate.
During teaching and research work she also continued to develop her skills as a visual artist. She received an MA in Graphic Design from the University of Hertfordshire (IDI), UK.
During her postgraduate studies she has developed an intermedial-hybrid art practice through analog printmaking that includes both traditional graphic printmaking (monotype, collagraph print) as well as alternative photographic printing processes such as cyanotype, vandyke, lumen, chemigram.
Her ongoing body of work in printmaking explores the experimental and innovative possibilities of analog graphic and alternative photographic printmaking in contemporary visual art.
Her film-related research work and intermedia/video art practice focus on the unconventional relationships of images and sounds.
For more information about her research areas and publications, please visit the academic profile page.
Artist Statement
As a visual artist and researcher I have a particular interest in intermedial, experimental and avant-garde art that reflects in my art practice. I use analogue hybrid art techniques such as painting graphically (monotype prints), painting with lights and shadows (lumen print) or making photographic work without camera (photograms/cyanotype, vandyke prints) as well as merging the boundaries of intermedia and video art.
The focus of my art practice is to capture an everchanging, uncertain state (psychological state or the uncertainty in nature), that directs the attention of vulnerability as a human and natural condition and how vulnerability of stability is inevitable in our world. To express this insecure state of being, I use accidental tools and “mistakes”, broken materials or decades-expired photographic papers, damaged by time. For monotype printmaking I usually print from broken glass to create unpredictable details with mistakes, unexpected accidents and to achieve an unquiet, “imperfect” outcome that can convey and express this precarious state.
My postgraduate project (an artists’book using cyanotype printmaking) explores the contemporary philosophical issue of vulnerability with essays and cyanotype prints. Vulnerability on the one hand, represents our wounded and traumatized life and culture, and, on the other, it represents what means to be human: it evokes strength, empathy and care for others. My whole printmaking process attempts to reflect on the different stages and various aspects of vulnerability.