In this Hungarian-language (but efficiently English subtitled!) lecture, visual artist Viola Fátyol presents the overlooked and yet unsung photographic legacy of Mariska Travnik, whose intimate images of rural life of the 1910s offer a rare young female perspective from Central and Eastern Europe. Held at Pikszis Kultúrpont, Budapest on May 14, 2025, the event weaves together two artistic lives—one nearly lost to history, the other actively reinterpreting it through a contemporary lens.
Visual artist and photographer Viola Fátyol presents a compelling exploration of Mariska Travnik’s little-known yet remarkable photographic legacy, created between 1914 and 1919. Although Travnik’s work has been included in public museum collections, featured in exhibitions, and examined in ethnographic studies as well as a television documentary on social photography, she remains a largely unrecognised figure in Hungarian cultural history. Her unique photographs, taken in rural Hungarian settings, offer a rare insider’s and distinctly young female perspective on the era and its communities.
In this presentation, Viola Fátyol not only reconstructs Travnik’s early life as a young photographer—an unsung hero of her time—but also situates Travnik’s influence within her own artistic practice. Drawing from her background as a visual artist whose practice is rooted in the Hungarian countryside, Fátyol offers insight into how her engagement with rural communities informs her methodology. Her long-standing collaboration with the women’s folk choir of Vámospércs, a community formed around shared histories and collective healing, played a pivotal role in the development of her doctoral project, 'If You Have a Heart, What You Did to Me Hurts You Too.'
This Hungarian-language event offers a dialogue between two interwoven artistic lives—one nearly forgotten, the other deeply engaged with the complexities of memory, place, and representation. The lecture was given on 14 May, 2025 at Pikszis Kultúrpont in Budapest.
You can read Viola Fátyol’s article about Mariska Travnik at this link.
