Mari Mahr: Two Walking
Curated by: Gabriella CSIZEK
November 13, 2015 – January 3, 2016
weekdays 2 pm – 7 pm
weekends 11 am - 19 pm
Closed on public holidays.
“I live between two countries, I have four citizenships, but since my parents were Hungarian, and I also lived here during the most important period of my life, from eight until I was thirty-two years old, the commitment to this nationality is natural for me.”[1]
Currently living in London, the photographer Mari Mahr (1941) was born in Santiago de Chile of Hungarian patronage. Her exhibition Two Walking presents two of her series connected to her late husband, Graham Percy. The New Zealand-born artist, illustrator, typographer, and designer was her partner in her everyday as well as artistic life for thirty-five years. The images taken during her husband’s serious illness and even after losing him are a testament to the irrevocability of both pain and death, life’s natural companion; yet, they also demonstrate the creative force within.
Poems written by the New Zealand poet-couple Gregory O’Brien and Jenny Bornholdt to her poems are integral to the exhibition.
Personal involvement and the presentation of experiencing, understanding, and processing events through complex images have always been present in Mari Mahr’s oeuvre. These ‘collage-photos’ cannot only be considered a continuation of some creative heritage but also their renewal. Living a life of cultural diversity, the symbolism therein become a whole in her images. Combining her private world of mysteries, Latin American magic realism blends in with elements of Eastern and Western European reality.
In her two series the cities of Edinburgh and Paris are sites where, in the wake of the walks together, memories gain a new life and the potential past emerges. In this world of construed scenes everything has a story and a meaning; here proportions get transformed and objects of remembrance obtain a different sense of importance along with new meanings in relation to each other.
(Gabriella Csizek, curator)
Mari Mahr was born in Santiago de Chile in 1941. She was brought up and educated in Santiago and in Budapest, Hungary.
In the early 60s – inspired by Jean Seberg’s cub-journalist character in Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless) – Mahr enrolled at the School of Journalism in Budapest, where she received her diploma. Simultaneously she became a trainee press-photographer at the Cultural Department of the Hungarian News Agency.
Over the next few years Mahr underwent a rigorous apprenticeship in photography with some of the greats in Hungarian photojournalism including Endre Friedman and Gábor Pálfai.
In 1973 having moved to London she continued her studies at the PCL where she received her BA Degree in Photographic Arts under Derek Drage, Gus Wylie, prof. Margaret Harker and Victor Burgin.
Her first solo exhibition took place at the Photographers’ Gallery in London starting a long term association with the gallery which continues till today. Mari Mahr has also had long term professional connection with Zelda Cheatle who exhibited her work in her gallery and represented her for over 10 years.
After her successful exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1980 Mahr began giving talks and lecturing at art schools and universities all over Britain – amongst them the Royal College of Art, Glasgow School of Art, Napier University Edinburgh.
In 1989 she received the prestigious Fox Talbot Award at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Britain.
A British Council retrospective took Mahr back to her native Santiago de Chile, as well as Argentina, Hungary, Spain and Greece.
Her work is now in collections worldwide, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The British Council, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh and the Hungarian Museum of Photography in Hungary.
She lives and works in London, but divides her time between London and Berlin.
[1] Kincses Károly: Fotográfusok – Made in Hungary (Magyar Fotográfiai Múzeum, 1998)