Un/Decisive Entanglements: A photographic exploration of space, repetition and urban change

At its heart are photographs of the transport infrastructure around the Kőbánya-Kispest terminus of the M3 line, which reveal everyday spaces of transition, repetition and social tension.

The project ties in directly with his research project “Spatialising Antagonism: The materialities of political (de)polarisation in contemporary Budapest, Hungary” and further develops two central conceptual perspectives. Firstly, it examines space not as a static backdrop, but as a politically produced and contested materiality. “I wanted the photographed infrastructures to appear as places where social transformations – from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism – are indeed deposited but are continually reconfigured through everyday practices, movements and uses,” says Gary Hussey of his project. At the same time, he documents how the political order is reproduced, interrupted or disrupted by the repetition of everyday life, as a metro station can reveal. “Politics,” says Hussey, “does not always take place solely in spectacular political events.”

The photo series deliberately distances itself from the “decisive moment” that so often seeks to capture attention on social media. The photographs represent, rather, an open investigation of processuality, immanence and interconnection. People, shadows, metal structures, reflections, dirt and graffiti enter into a non-hierarchical relationship with one another and generate a visual language that resists unambiguous interpretations. It is precisely through this that the work opens up access to the sensory and material dimensions of the political, which often elude discursive analysis. That, too, is research.