ARTIST STATEMENT
The three submitted works — Unrooted (English), Fragment Suspendu (French), and Nyom (Hungarian) — are part of the broader Petite Pensées Suspendues series. These pieces focus on the difficulties of finding stability while growing up across multiple cultures, highlighting memory, transition, and the ongoing search for selfhood and belonging.
My work explores how memory, absence, and longing shape identity. In these images, I display fragments of photographs to capture the way past experiences linger in incomplete, shifting forms. The work speaks to the instability of becoming, where identity is not fixed but pieced together from what remains. These suspended traces invite viewers to reflect on how transformation is never linear, but layered with what is lost, forgotten, or held onto.
As a woman immigrant, my practice engages with the struggles of belonging and the complexities of womanhood across different cultural contexts. Growing up, I moved through five different countries, each relocation leaving me without a stable sense of home. This instability informs both my life and artistic practice: the suspended images echo the feeling of always being in-between, of searching for roots while carrying fragments of many places. By working with fragile and impermanent materials, I mirror the uncertainties of identity and the tensions of adaptation, while also suggesting resilience through persistence and memory.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Emy Ori is a trilingual, Chicago-based artist originally from Hungary who has lived across Europe. Working with photography, film, and digital art, she explores themes of loss, longing, memory, and the struggles of womanhood as an immigrant. Her practice often incorporates techniques such as emulsion lift, distortion, and self-portraiture, creating images that invite open-ended interpretation and personal connection.
© Emy Ori