ZONE1 is Vienna Contemporaryʼs signature platform for emerging talent,

presenting solo exhibitions by ten outstanding artists under the age of 40 with

strong connections to Austria. Curator Aliaksei Barysionak brought together artistic

practices that engage with themes of migration and displacement, as well as critical

feminist perspectives. Featuring a wide range of media, ZONE1 2025 highlighted

positions that are integral to Viennaʼs contemporary art scene but often remain

underrepresented within Austriaʼs institutional frameworks.

Within this framework, I developed a new body of work based on my research on traps. Over recent years, my work has focused on landscape

narratives, particularly through the collection  of the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest. I have been interested in capturing two kinds of

movement: the imagined and internalized landscape, and the agency of the landscape itself.

        This dual attention led me to the motif of the trap, which  anthropologist Alfred Gell describes as a “deadly parody of the animal’s Umwelt.” For

me,  traps represent the hijacked forces of the landscape, where natural agency becomes redirected, restructured, and instrumentalized by human

intention. I have come to understand traps not only as isolated objects but as part of larger infrastructures – material and symbolic systems that

extend the logic of entrapment across time and space. In this sense, infrastructure can be seen as the prolonged operation of a trap:

a persistent, often invisible mechanism of control, maintenance, and world-making.

        My works investigate this slow violence as it appears in domestic, emotional, and environmental spaces, especially in those situations where

oppression emerges within intimacy – within the familiar landscape of home. By combining artistic intuition with theoretical frameworks, I seek to

visualize and perform the tensions between containment and escape, tradition and transformation. Traps in my work are not only tools of capture,

but also ways of reading the world: they illuminate the structures –material, cultural, and emotional – that bind, repeat, and enclose.

At the same time, they raise the possibility of interruption, resistance, and new forms of agency.