Relic of a Soft Regime, 2018

Photography with glitch-based digital manipulation, archival pigment print on paper – 1058 × 1058 mm

Bónyai Barbara’s Relic of a Soft Regime simultaneously reflects on personal and collective memory while raising complex social and aesthetic questions through a simple yet multilayered object – a Kádár-era Christmas candy. The work is based on a photograph of the candy placed on a mirror against a dark background, which is then rotated 90 degrees and digitally glitch-manipulated to create an image that is both abstract and figurative, inviting intriguing associative interpretations from the viewer.

At first glance, the image evokes a detail of a futuristic body – the boundaries between human flesh and object blur, revealing a new, digitally distorted anatomy. This transformation, expressed through the glitch aesthetic, embodies the distortions of nostalgia and remembrance: memories are not merely preserved but rewritten, shifted, and imbued with errors, while simultaneously acquiring new meanings. The artwork thus speaks both to the tangible relics of the past and to the complex visual culture of the digital present.

The candy as an object stands as a symbol of the “soft dictatorship” of the Kádár era – simultaneously a nostalgic and ironic remembrance encapsulating the flavors, forms, and atmospheres characteristic of that period. The color and form vocabulary of the piece retains the original materiality of the object, while the glitch’s noisy texture injects a vibrant new dimension into the image. The viewer encounters the work on two levels: from a distance, the overall composition appears serene and almost abstractly unified; up close, the granular noise and distortions generate compelling visual tension.

In this piece, Bónyai operates at the intersection of traditional and digital media, exploring the relationship between objecthood and embodied culture. Relic of a Soft Regime acts both as a preservative and deconstructive gesture – it does not merely evoke objects from the past but reshapes them, thereby raising urgent questions about collective memory, identity, and the digital age.