Opacity As A Healing Space at Limbo Contemporary, Milan, IT
Curated by Zoë De Luca Legge
16 June – 13 September, 2025
Szilvia Bolla, Lorenzo Conforti
Opacity as a Healing Space, a double solo exhibition by Szilvia Bolla and Lorenzo Conforti, investigates hybrid forms of resilience in a visually oversaturated and psychologically charged world. The artists’ languages intertwine into slow-paced contemplation, resisting the ever-pressing demand for clear meaning whilst cherishing the ambiguous and the unresolved instead...Szilvia Bolla’s research explores the emotional and psychosomatic dimensions of contemporary life as well, yet focuses on the convergence between body, mind, and medical-pharmaceutical systems. Ingrained in a post-photographic approach, her works embody a plunging sensitivity to vulnerability and transformation. Bolla’s practice begins where images end. She translates visual thinking into material forms, transforming personal history into symbolic, sculptural narrative to address the invisible pressures of a world shaped by trauma, systemic depression, and biopolitical control. Her resin works trace the path of unregulated psychotropic drugs through the body: beginning with ingestion, ending with a fractured hip. An event drawn from her grandmother’s experience — in which a dizzy spell from medication caused her to fall while watering her garden, resulting in physical injury and psychological collapse. These sculptures merge the beauty of blossoms and the logic of prosthetics, reflecting how the body is reshaped by external pharmacological and political forces. An emotionally charged space where the nervous system meets systemic neglect.
Bolla reclaims decorative language as resistance, reverberating Conforti’s graffiti-informed background. His wall drawings softly wrap her pleated stomach sculpture, generating a space for contemplative antagonism. Though rooted in different mediums, the two artists engage with absence, transformation, and emotional depth. They both create works that defy fixed interpretation, embracing fragmentation and ungraspable, open-ended narratives. Though rooted in different mediums, the two artists confront absence, transformation, and emotional depth. They invite viewers to linger. Conforti paints the air around things to engage with existential voids, while Bolla shapes psychic wounds and memories into physical forms. In both practices, the medium becomes a place of care, metamorphosis, and eventually healing. A shifting zone echoes collective states of flux through poetic resistance.
If The Ghost No Corpse at Vunu Gallery, Vienna, AT
Curated by Niki Bernath
9 May – 14 June, 2025
Eliza Ballesteros, Szilvia Bolla, Hannah Rose Stewart
The Neurobiology of Love at Krupa Art Foundation, Wrocław, PL
Curated by Boris Ondreička
14 March – 1 June, 2025
Szilvia Bolla, Joey Holder, Denisa Lehocká, Ursula Mayer, Luboš Plný, Iza Tarasewicz
Soaking in Each Other / Endocrine Regimes at Trafó Gallery, Budapest, HU
Curated by Judit Szalipszki
18 January - 2 March 2025
Lucy Beech, Szilvia Bolla, Aliza Orlan, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger
LOG3: Interceptor at Plicnik Space Initiative, London, UK
Installation by Amélie Mckee & Melle Nieling
8 November – 21 December 2024
Beatrice Vorster, Szilvia Bolla, Sabrina Ratté, Evangelia Dimitrakopoulou
Vigil: Death & the Afterlife at Semester.9, Loods6 & Shipton, Amsterdam, NL
Curated by Isabella Greenwood
22 November - 7 December, 2024
Bora Akinciturk, Maksud Ali Mondal, Honey Baker, DaddyBears, Doron Beuns, Ernest Bessems, Lily Bloom, Szilvia Bolla, Kate Burling, Šimon Chovan, Jamie John Davies, Folkert De Jong, Necker Doll, Leon Scott-Engel, Phoebe Evans, Ella Fleck, Max Otis King, K.T., Kobel, Anna-Lena Krause, Nataliya Zuban, Harry Hugo Little, Andrei Nițu, Tomasz Skibicki, Bregje Sliepenbeek & Salomé Wu
Veils of Impermanence at Gossamer Fog, London, UK
12 October – 10 November 2024
Elli Antoniou, Szilvia Bolla, Christina Cushin, Xavier Robles De Medina, Elinor Haynes, Eve Stotesbury, Viktor Timofeev
Double Cast at Berlínskej Model, Prague, CZ
Curated by Agáta Hošnová & Karolína Voleská
26 - 29 June 2024
Szilvia Bolla, Christophe Gilland, Zu Kalinowska, Emir Šehanović, Veronika Švecová
Running Up That Hill at Glassyard Gallery, Budapest, HU
Curated by Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács
Design by Áron Lődi
22 March - 24 May 2024
The art of Szilvia Bolla, which started with abstract anti-photographs reacting against the depressive overconsumption of pictures, now arrived at a post-photographic praxis that tackles the subject of depression itself. As depression is both individual and social, biological and political, the exhibition Running Up that Hill confronts the aesthetic and political dimensions of personal, transgenerational as well as systemic depression of a depressive economical-ideological system. The audio-visual installations, reconstructing autobiographical and symbolic mnemotopes, the pharmaco- kinetic sculptures of bodies deformed by the biopower, in addition to the neurograms based on the analogy between the photograph and the skin, are assembled as points in a depresthetic and psychopolitical manifesto.
Formal problems and problem-forms of Bolla, dismantling the dichotomies of the visible and the invisible, the material and immaterial, the dead and the alive, previously discussed in a photo-ontological and photo-critical context, here are reprogrammed to create a network of connections from Kate Bush to Walter Benjamin, from spectropolitics to Secession, or from black metal to material feminism.
The exhibition was supported by Stroom Den Haag.