Szilvia Bolla
Preliminary Materials for a Neurogenesis of the Young-Girl
August - October 2025
Preliminary Materials for a Neurogenesis of the Young-Girl is a project by Szilvia Bolla conceived and developed over the course of Bolla’s month-long residency at lower_cavity. Expanding on the artist’s central preoccupations with convergences of body, mind, affective labor, and psychopharmacology as constructed within neoliberal systems, the suite of works explores non-normative perceptions of temporality arising in subjects distorted by neuro-capitalism and necropolitics.
The works combine Bolla’s delicate, 3D-printed resin sculptures–themselves a beguiling hybrid of floral architectures and human viscera– with materials foraged from local antique fairs and surplus industrial components sourced from a nearby clean-technology startup.
Situated within in the ruined post-industrial architecture of lower_cavity’s project spaces, Bolla's works operate in a modality of Gothic post-humanism, meditating on the ways metanarratives of capitalist production have informed gendered conceptions of physical and mental health from the 19th century to the present.
Szilvia Bolla (b. Budapest, Hungary) lives and works between Budapest, Hungary and The Hague, The Netherlands. She explores the personal, social, and cultural dimensions of depression, transgenerational trauma and memory through sculpture and photography, evoking bodies shaped by biopolitics. After graduating from the Fine Art Photography course at Camberwell College of Arts in London, she completed the MA Photography course at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. She is currently part of the MFA program at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.
In recent years, her work has been presented at Gossamer Fog, London; Krupa Art Foundation, Wrocław; Trafó Gallery, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest and Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She has been an artist in residence at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; the International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York City; Brno House of Arts, Brno; and the recipient of the Eastern European Network Fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. She’s part of the artist duo Alagya with Áron Lődi. They construct new possible forms of literacy to decode planetary life in the capitalocene through writing, storytelling, and installation.