In the absence of the possibility for physical exploration of the outside world, a tension arises between inner experience and the reality outside one’s personal space, outside the body—a split that functions as a mechanism for understanding one’s way-of-being-in-the-world. From a distance, emotion becomes decipherable, perceptible, inscribed in a linguistic register and, most importantly, manageable—like an object.

Through a material medium—specifically black-and-white digital prints—Fruzsina Siklódy translates a process of recognizing the world and thereby rewrites emotion not as a constant state, but as an inverse reflex, triggered only in rare, exceptional moments—a negative space in which daily absence outlines the intensity of presence.

To inhabit an emotion means to traverse it with the whole body, but also to recognize its invisible outline. It is not only about what is felt, but also about what is missing in order to feel. In this sense, the “negative space” does not merely mark the field of the visible, but constitutes an affective topology: a territory of the reverse, where emotion exists only through contrast with the state that precedes it.

In the French phenomenological tradition, affect is never isolated from the world; it is precisely the way the world is given to us. However, Fruzsina Siklódy does not offer the world in its fullness, but in counterpoint—as if every moment of freedom, quiet, or intensity carries within it the memory of an opposing state. Emotion, experienced under such conditions, is already a form of exception. It does not settle in, but erupts—like a burst of meaning—in rare spaces, privileged by context.

Just as the photographic negative retains what the eye cannot directly see, Fruzsina’s works retain what cannot be permanently lived. The black-and-white image becomes a device for thought. The contrast is not only visual, but ontological—a tension between the presence of the real and the withdrawal of the affective, between the body that is “here” and the memory that extends “elsewhere.”

The pandemic context intensified this dialectic. In the absence of freedom of movement, exterior space became a projection of an interior marked by absence; and moments of freedom appeared as affective overexposures, saturated with meaning precisely because they were fleeting. Bachelard might speak here of a “poetics of exception”—that intimate geography in which houses, streets, landscapes are no longer mere places, but condensed forms of emotional memory.

“Emotion as (Negative) Space” is described, processually, as a meditation on the reversibility between experience and representation. The viewer is not simply invited to recognize a space, but to rediscover their own experience of emotional inversion: freedom felt only once, calm attained only in retreat, joy experienced against the background of its daily absence. In this sense, each image functions as a fragment—an attempt to capture not the emotion itself, but the empty place that makes it possible.

Fruzsina Siklódy was born in 2000 in Miercurea Ciuc. She studied at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, where she earned her BA in 2022 and her MA in 2024, specializing in Graphics. In recent years, she has held several solo exhibitions, including at the Új Kriterion Gallery in Miercurea Ciuc and Casa Matei Gallery in Cluj-Napoca. She has also participated in international biennials and group exhibitions, including at MAMÜ Gallery in Budapest and the Bánffy Palace in Cluj-Napoca. In her recent work, the central theme is the study of the built environment and space.