Liz Miller Kovács is a photographer and interdisciplinary artist, born in Los Angeles and currently based in Berlin. Her artistic practice explores the parallels between the Anthropocene landscape and the female body. In her large-format photographs, she documents industrial landscapes – mining areas, waste storage sites, quarries – locations where human intervention has left visible and lasting marks on the natural environment. However, the landscape is not merely the subject of documentation; it is also an aesthetic construction that gains new meaning within an art-historical context. Her compositions allude to Romantic landscape painting and the aesthetics of the sublime, particularly the work of Caspar David Friedrich, which she reinterprets through a contemporary, critical lens. The colourful, faceless, and anonymous female figure appearing in her images, veiled in mystery, evokes not only Friedrich’s solitary wanderers but also the historical and aesthetic tradition of objectifying the female body. By adopting poses and body positions familiar from classical depictions of women, she brings into focus the notion of the female body as passive and exposed to the viewer’s gaze. Yet despite their sculptural presence, the figures in her photographs are not passive – they bear witness, they resist, they rise like totems from the industrial landscape. The photographs may also be seen as performative documents, as the artist captures self-portraits embedded within real landscapes. These images can be interpreted as the visual legacy of a civilisation that leaves behind the destruction of its own conditions for existence. In Miller Kovács’s work, the architecture of the idealised landscape is constructed through the aestheticisation of environmental degradation. Her photographs simultaneously portray natural beauty and carry the unsettling presence of ruin and decline.
Györgyi Cséffai is a young visual artist whose ceramic and organic material-based objects and installations explore the relationship between nature and femininity from an intimate, personal perspective. Her works engage with experiences of vulnerability, fertility and transience, motherhood and loss. In her central installation, cracked spherical forms embedded in the earth symbolise female archetypes, representing not only the changing body but also the passage of time and life cycles. An interactive installation composed of ceramic seeds arranged in concentric circles focuses on the experience of becoming a parent, consisting of 252 unique elements that allude to the nine months of pregnancy. The work examines the possibility of preserving or discarding thoughts and memories as seeds — a material, active form of sharing and care. Each seed contains a hidden message, and visitors are invited to take pieces of the installation with them. However, the personal reflections placed inside — related to the period of pregnancy — only become accessible if the ceramic shell is broken. In this way, the work becomes not only a metaphor for birth but also a medium for knowledge, memory, and responsibility. The decision to preserve the closed form of the seed or to break it open — like the cracking of the body’s surface — simultaneously conveys a sense of vulnerability and liberation. Cséffai’s practice draws on motifs from folk culture and traditional craft techniques, reinterpreting them in contemporary, often ephemeral forms. In her work, the relationship between the female body and nature is approached not as an idealised notion, but as a tangible, material presence. She reimagines an organic, traditional visual language as a space of memory and sensuality.
The works of Liz Miller Kovács and Györgyi Cséffai reflect on the parallels between ecological and bodily transformation, and the historical and contemporary representations of nature and the female body, each from a different perspective. The exhibition draws on collective memory and experience, while simultaneously raising questions about the future of nature and humanity. What will remain of us? What kind of legacy will be shaped from what we leave behind? The works of Liz Miller Kovács and Györgyi Cséffai explore the possibilities of transformation and regeneration, preservation and care — along the fluid boundaries between body and nature.
Zsófia Máté
