For the 2022 Paris Photo edition, Anca Poterasu Gallery premiers the artist couple dialogue between Aurora and Iosif Király with never-before-seen images from their archive. Although the artists have previously shown work together in group exhibitions and collaborative events, the conversation will uniquely focus on a deeper understanding of how both artists influenced each other’s work on the relation between memory layers, personal and historical histories and photography.

Their collection of shared photo portraits and experimental work in the 1990s unveils intertwined and reciprocal influences, during a time of political transition and social transformation after the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe. Unpredictable times, defined by high expectations and low resources, impacted a decade through which both Aurora and Iosif Király’s artistic and cultural engagements were nonetheless paramount to the recognition of photography as an art form in Romania.

We are presenting side by side a selection of images from Aurora Király’s Melancholia (1997 – 2001) series and Iosif Király’s Echoes (2013) photomontage objects. Both bodies of work will have fed into their signature-mark oeuvre. For Aurora Király, it developed into a reflection on radical subjectivity and memory-making, with a fluent commentary on the experience of activating as a woman in the arts in a still very patriarchal society, leading up to the rather recent recognition of her work.

For Iosif Király, whose work within the mail-art movement in the 1980s and later on as part of the subReal group has enabled him to work through numerous archives, the multiple possible connections to disparate time alternatives co-existing in the same place find a more a biographical approach in his dialogue with Aurora Király.