Preliminary Materials for a Neurogenesis of the Young-Girl, lower_cavity, Holyoke, USA
13 September - 26 October 2025

Preliminary Materials of a Neurogenesis of the Young-Girl, a new project by Szilvia Bolla, developed during her 4-week residency at lower_cavity. Expanding on the artist’s central preoccupations with convergences of body, mind, psychopharmacology, and labour within neoliberal systems, these new works explore non-normative perceptions of temporality arising in subjects distorted by neuro-capitalism and necropolitics.
The project combines Bolla’s delicate, 3D-printed resin sculptures–themselves a beguiling hybrid of the floral and the visceral– with materials foraged from local antique fairs and surplus industrial components sourced from a nearby clean-technology startup. Situated within the ruined post-industrial architecture of lower_cavity’s project spaces, Bolla's project operates in a space of Gothic post-humanism, meditating on the ways the metanarratives of capitalist production have informed gendered conceptions of physical and mental health from the 19th century to the present.

This is Bolla's first presentation of her work in the US and the 24th hosted residency at l_c. 

I Need More Time, Arter, Istanbul, TR
Curated by Oğuz Karakütük
9 October 2025 – 8 March 2026
Arda Asena, Ruth van Beek, Szilvia Bolla, Rachelle Bussières, Antony Cairns, Orhan Cem Çetin, Görkem Ergün, Alina Frieske, Ege Kanar, Şahin Kaygun, Lebohang Kganye, Dionne Lee, Alix Marie, Rehan Miskci, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Ayako Sakuragi, Dafna Talmor, Rodrigo Valenzuela

Szilvia Bolla establishes a hybrid language in her artistic practice that moves between post-photography, sculpture and installation. Challenging the physical and conceptual boundaries of photography, the artist works with techniques such as stereolithography, luminograms and other forms of image-making that do not involve a camera. Her work focuses on themes such as new materialism, feminist theories of the body and trauma memory, and proposes a new visual realm she terms “crypto-photography”, where the fundamental components of photography – light, chemistry, digital data and physical materiality – are treated as conceptual tools. Rather than using traditional devices such as the camera or lens, Bolla foregrounds the process of image formation and its material traces – an approach she refers to as “Onto-Photo-Logical-Anxiety”, stemming from a reflection on the ontological status of the image. She works through abstract images that lack fixed codes of representation and remain open to physical intervention. This understanding, articulated through a technical exploration ranging from UV-printed luminograms to sculptural installations, opens alternative paths by investigating the core components of photography. The works featured in the exhibition, selected from the Rivotril Flowers Fall series, take as their starting point a traumatic fall experienced by the artist’s grandmother. Drawing on this personal event, Bolla explores the physical and psychological effects of medication, intervening in form while transforming images produced through imaging technologies into three-dimensional objects. These photographic sculptures render visible the tension between the neurological system and emotional states, while also offering a contemporary framework in which to reconsider historical dichotomies such as nature and technology, or functionality and aesthetics. Through this multilayered mode of expression, Bolla’s works investigate the unstable nature of time and the relationship that poetry establishes with the body and with surfaces.

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.

Set Design as Alagya for Xx-63, performed by Trevoga Collective
Premiered at Theatre Bellevue, Amsterdam, July 2025
Artistic direction and choreography Neda Ruzheva | dramaturgy Nikola Stoyanov | performers Ana Szopa, Ming Jou Chen, Nazar Rakhmanov | set design Alagya Aron Lodi & Szilvia Bolla | light design Erik van de Wijdeven | music Manolis Elijah Sueuga | designer wear David Siepman | styling Michalina Górnik | prosthetics Zoia Atkinson

In Xx-63, the body is not a sacred place but an abandoned shopping mall: crammed with the remnants of consumer culture, synthetic chemicals, and sexually charged images. Here, fear is not an abstraction, but a physical state - something that crawls, wriggles, and bites. The performers scratch at the shiny surfaces of urban hyperreality and lay bare its disturbing undercurrents. From the distorted clichés and symbols, a mirror of a grotesque and confused present emerges.

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

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.