At Ani Molnár Gallery in Budapest, Veronika Csonka’s solo exhibition What has been here all along (Ami eddig is itt volt) takes observation as an artistic practice. It asks how we might connect with nature and the living systems around us in a life increasingly shaped by cities, technology and mediated experience. The show runs from 18 September to 20 November 2026.
Many people feel the wish to be close to nature, the gallery notes, while its workings stay distant and hard to perceive. Plants, water and other living systems tend to be seen as one backdrop, without attention to the small, often invisible processes taking place within them. Csonka does not look for a romantic return to nature. Her work explores how new forms of connection might be made with the living systems of which we are already a part.
A garden in Zamárdi
One personal starting point is the artist’s family garden in Zamárdi, part of her family’s life for generations. Once mainly a place of daily sustenance and care, for Csonka it has become a space of memory and a point of connection with nature. It led to a sensor-based object that worked in the garden before the exhibition, monitoring and recording environmental parameters that everyday observation would miss.
Here technology does not replace the experience of nature. In the gallery’s words, it extends our attention, attempting to turn a physically distant place into a system that keeps changing before our eyes.
Under the microscope
Microscopic images, specimens, biological structures, measurement data and slow biochemical processes appear throughout the exhibition, presented as starting points for different ways of observing nature rather than as scientific illustration. The paintings and objects draw partly on Csonka’s own microscope observations, and their materials evoke a laboratory. On the canvases, abstract organic forms seem at once familiar and alien, holding beauty and strangeness, order and decay.
Connection does not have to come only through science or technology. Observing a closed ecosystem, caring for plants or watching the biological processes of the kitchen are everyday situations in which people take part in living systems rather than simply looking at them.
The exhibition follows the stages of the artist’s own attempts to reconnect. Rather than defining nature, it looks at the tools we use to understand it, and suggests that connection may never have disappeared, only that we need to learn to notice what has been here all along.
Csonka was born in Siófok in 1992 and lives and works in Budapest. She graduated from the Painting Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2019. Her work, from paintings to objects drawn with a 3D pen, places living tissue and systems within a scientific framework. Her first solo exhibition, Biotic Mechanism, was held at am projects in 2024. Zselyke Molnos, co-founder and director of the Hungarian Ecopsychology Institute, opened the show on 17 September.
Artist: Veronika Csonka / @veronikacsonka
Photography: Courtesy of Ani Molnár Gallery
Location: Ani Molnár Gallery / @animolnargallery, Bródy Sándor utca 36, Budapest, Hungary
