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The

Artist

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Photographer

Emese Tóthová

Nominated in
2026
By
Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
Lives and Works in
Paris, Budapest
Emese Tóthová (1997) was born in Slovakia and currently lives and works in Paris and Budapest. She graduated in 2022 with a BA in Photography from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, and in 2024 pursued her Master’s at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Since 2019 she is a member of the Studio of Young Photographers. She held her first solo exhibition at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in 2024. Tóthová’s work is a study of the “floating state”. The moments where detachment and connection coexist. Drawing from her experiences living in many different countries, she investigates how physical and emotional distance affects our sense of home. Her practice often centers on the “unspoken gesture”: the postcard never sent, the ancestral name carried as a burden, or the childhood game re-enacted in an adult apartment. By blending personal archives with performative actions, Tóthová asks how we can prepare for the future, specifically motherhood and adulthood, while still reconciling with the “closed systems” of our family histories. Her images serve as self-awareness exercises, balancing the liberation of play with the anxieties of responsibility.
Projects
2025

POSTCARDS I HAVE NEVER SENT

Every year, my mother recounts her postcard collection. Her carefully organized collection now contains over five thousand postcards. I have my own category: the cards I send her from foreign countries. In 2025, however, not a single new card made it into this category. I traveled half the world, yet I couldn’t manage to address and send even one. In my family, a postcard is not just an image. It’s a gesture. A physical proof that I’m okay, and that despite the distance, I remain connected to my home. It’s one of photography’s simplest, yet most intimate forms. Sending postcards has become a forgotten gesture in our time. Postcard collections grow slowly now, as the physical format has been replaced by digital image sharing. Yet this shift has stripped away something essential: the tangible presence, the deliberate act of choosing, writing, and sending. My travels are dreamlike: a transitional state, detached from everything. During my journeys, sending postcards always pulled me back to reality. Simultaneously a signal home and a bond to what I temporarily left behind. In 2025, I created my own postcards. These images depict the places as I experienced them: dreamlike, sometimes not reflecting reality at all. The narrative is organized around an absence, but remains open. Capturing a floating, transitional state where travel, detachment, and connection exist simultaneously.
Show full project
Emese Tóthová
was nominated by
Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
in
2026
Show all projects
Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.

Ákos Levente’s practice repositions analog photography within the 21st-century media environment, examining archives, authentication, AI-generated imagery, and ethical questions of sustainability.

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In Emese Tóthová’s work, childhood appears not as a closed past but as a continuously reinterpreted foundation of becoming an adult; using her own living space as a performative site, she explores liminality and presence through the honesty of awkwardness and fragile moments.

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‍Emma Szabó’s intimate and analytical visual language goes beyond mere documentation, capturing the isolation and identity formation of Generations Z and Alpha while articulating universal generational experiences through local contexts.

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‍Anna Kereszty’s research-based, narrative projects unfold at the boundaries of reality and fiction, where observation, memory, and storytelling mechanisms intersect.

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‍Vanessa Lucrezia Francia employs a reflective, sensitive, and playful photographic approach to address questions of identity, female roles, and intergenerational and intercultural relationships, portraying her subjects with dignity, affection, and sharp critical awareness.

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Through this selection, Capa Center highlights the original, complex, and internationally relevant voices of contemporary Hungarian photography within the FUTURES platform.

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Members of the jury:

Katalin Kopin, curator of the Capa Center

Emese Mucsi, curator of the Capa Center

Zsófia Rechnitzer, artistic director of TORULA, owner of the Rechnitzer Gallery

Dániel Szalai, photographer, visual artist, doctoral student at MOME, FUTURES Talent2020

István Virágvölgyi, artistic director of the Capa Center

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