Starry Bay

Starry Bay is the collection compiled by Ábel Szalontai. Waves easing off, ripples, splashes, and stormy waters. Gazes sweeping over the skyline. Buoys, fishing nets, hulls. Waiting for the suitable weather conditions for the ships to leave port. Sailors, fishermen, islanders, passersby. The harbor is the venue for encounters and goodbyes, arrivals and departures. Misty, sunny, night and snow-covered shores. Continuous buzzing, regardless of the time of day.

At the same time, the harbor is also a recreational, strategic, administrative, and economic hub, a scene for battles, exchanges and commerce. The cargo of the ships arriving from long journeys and faraway lands are piled up in unremarkable containers and barrels hiding exotic products and produce. The artistic depiction of ships looks back to thousands of years of tradition, starting from the hieroglyphs of Egyptian papyrus scrolls to the galleys appearing on Greek vases, the almost entirely authentic and accurate paintings of the Renaissance masters portraying the vessels of our age, and finally the photographic representations. With the passing of time, the galleys decorated with paintings and carvings gave way to the multiple-masted caravels serving in the Age of Discovery and colonization, and nowadays the ports are filled with heavy steel hulls, gigantic cruisers and liners. The act of navigation starts and ends with arriving at the shores.

“Near the sea, exploring the skyline, immersed in the crowded or desolated world of ports, I always find that somehow everything is about the past there. The present is the endless cycle of the repeated past. The importance of memories is heightened, the past is more important than the future. In addition, islands provide an extra sense of acceptance and inclusion, possibly because those living there still remember that they have arrived from somewhere else too. Harbors are seaside havens, resting places for the mind, which ages more slowly there than the body,” says the photographer about his images.

The photographs of Ábel Szalontai can only present one slice of the endless, visual repository of water. The quiet of his photographs generates tension: the abundance of symbols, the endless skyline, the little details of harbor life delineate these invisible stories.

Judit Gellér, curator

The light is tremendously important in the North during the darkest months of Winter. In January, when all the Christmas lights have been but away, it’s even more important than before. At 8 o’clock in the morning you can spot young children with rucksacks sneaking slowly along the pavements, listening to the characteristic crunching sound from their own winter boots tramping delicately on the dry snow

Looking at Abel Szalontai’s photographs from Iceland in the darkest of months, I sense how they have evoked hidden childhood memories in my body, at the same time as they document my reality today and make me reflect upon the existentially circumstances of daily life in this small community in the North I call my home. I experience the location of my life through the eyes of the outsider.

The photographer walks slowly around, alone outside in the daytime darkness, documenting the environment before him, adding a deeper meaning to it. The soccer goal by the shore, standing lonesome at 11 in the morning, when the first sunbeams of the day casts it’s light on the sea and glitters on the snow, which at that moment seems both wet and chilling, waiting for the children to be off from school and come back to play. Looking at this photograph, I sense again lost moments from my childhood. In that sense it’s like time stands still in Szalontai’s photographs, that the past and the present melts together, as they simultaneously depict the reality of the people living in Iceland in the 21st Century. A feeling from the past merges with the sensation of the observer in the present. Two time periods coalesce.

One can state, that a good artist does not only see what he expects to see but is willing to enter a dialogue with reality itself. It is like he is opening up for a resonance with reality or what the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has descried as being open to the world, wanting to be affected and wanting to respond or answer.² When in resonance with the world, one experiences “this other” which transforms her or him.³ According to Rosa: “Art should insist on the transformative element of resonance.” He explains: “[...] art is one sphere where we can explore different ways of being in the world and of relation to the world and I think really this is what art is about.”⁴ A photograph as a medium of art makes a space for the artist to meet the reality in both a realistic and dreamlike way, to affect and to be affected, to transform and be transformed, or to be in active conversation and at some moments also in resonance with the world. “Resonance is tied to an openness, of wanting to be affected and answering,“⁵ as Rosa explains it, and adds that even though resonance is always emotional and embodied it is not dissolved from the cognitive element, which I would like to add is also necessary for us to dwell creatively in the world.⁶

The artificial light that makes everything seem clearer, but also harsher to deal with Szalontai’s photograph of the quietness that can be found in the coldness of the night. As the soft light of the morning sun glittering on the corrugated iron of a renovated house in a remote fjord, as well as his photograph of the three sisters by a window in the January dimness, looking with some significance towards the photographer, combine an interesting story, inviting the observer to engage with and creating a poetic narration in resonance with reality about life in the past, the present and the future.

¹ A quote from the story „House no. 451“ by the Icelandic author Gyrðir Elíasson. The quote is from Elíason‘s acclaimed short-story collection Between the Trees. Unpublished translation by Mark Ioli. See Gyrðir Elíasson, Milli trjánna. Smásögur, Akranes: Uppheimar, 2009.
² Hartmut Rosa, Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relataionship to the World, transl. James C. Wagner. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2019 and Thijs Lijster og Robin Celikates, “Beyond the Echo-chamber: An interview with Hartmut Rosa on Resonance and Alienation.” Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, 2019: Issue I, p. 72.
³ Thijs Lijster og Robin Celikates: “Beyond the Echo-chamber: An interview with Hartmut Rosa on Resonanace and Alienation,” p. 74.
⁴ Ibid, p. 68.
⁵ Ibid, p. 72.
⁶ Ibid, p. 76.