Monika Sziladi

Lives and works in New York City, NY

Artist statement

As an immigrant from Budapest, Hungary to New York City by way of Paris, I transitioned from soft-communism to hyper-capitalism, and from an analog upbringing to digital adulthood. To digest these cultural changes, I have been photographing human interaction in the world and creating digital montages of candidly shot pictures.* My digital photomontage work of the past seventeen years has been exploring the ways in which technology—and the proliferation of photography—has wedged itself into human relationships since Facebook was launched in 2004, the iPhone in 2007, and Instagram in 2010. Roughly following the timeline of social media’s increasingly overwhelming influence on our inner lives, the montages evolved from subtle and labor intensive manipulations to jarring compositions. For over a decade, I’ve been fascinated by how little control we have, it seems, as individuals, over the ways in which technology affect us. How do we end up using a tool and how do we function in and navigate a system designed around us? How do we grapple with our own inventions? How do we skew, adapt to, and appropriate design intentions? How does social pressure and rapid change disrupt and drag us all into changing our behavior? How do these developments affect us as social beings? In 2024, I expanded my archive to include AI-generated images. By 2026, I began combining them with candid photographs or using them exclusively to reflect on how increasingly difficult it is to differentiate a...

Artwork