Image: Center for Modern and Contemporary Art Debrecen
MODEM Modern and Contemporary Art Centre in Debrecen will open The Unrisen Sun // Jégbe zárt nap, a solo exhibition by Kádár Emese, on June 21, with the show running until September 6, 2026. Presented in the museum’s Project Space, the exhibition looks at mourning through the lens of contemporary art and extends the artist’s earlier interest in digital memory and present-day rituals of grief into a more lyrical and personal register.
According to MODEM’s exhibition text, Kádár Emese is a Debrecen-born visual artist, and the new series, Ghost Traces, develops from an experience of visiting a cemetery in summer, when intense July heat and glaring sunlight stood in stark contrast to the frozen state of grief. That tension shapes the exhibition’s central image: a timeless, sunlit yet icy landscape in which the desire to preserve memory meets the need to let go.
The exhibition brings together textile works and experiments in needle felting, and links the language of mourning with the symbols of digital remembrance. Modeled in part through motifs such as bookmarks, save icons and audio-play buttons, the work connects everyday digital interfaces with cold natural forms and the imagery of mourning rites. In that way, the exhibition places a very contemporary set of signs inside a deeply emotional subject: how grief is carried, stored and revisited in an age of screens and data.
MODEM says the show also widens from individual experience to broader questions about digital inheritance and the preservation of memory. Its Arctic atmosphere is tied, in the institution’s framing, to the idea of data centers buried in the permafrost of Svalbard, raising questions about what societies insist on preserving, what is buried, and what may need to be brought back to the surface before being released. The exhibition is curated by Sárai Vanda.
The project fits MODEM’s broader program of combining contemporary practice with themes that speak beyond the gallery. The Debrecen institution has positioned this summer around a set of exhibitions that connect art to memory, material process and local cultural life, including a broader 20th-anniversary collection show elsewhere in the museum and a retrospective textile exhibition by Kányási Holb Margit.
For the wider art world, The Unrisen Sun // Jégbe zárt nap is significant because it joins a growing body of contemporary work that uses material experimentation to address grief not as a private, closed subject, but as something shaped by technology, archives and public ritual. By bringing digital metaphors into textile-based forms, Kádár Emese’s exhibition asks how memory survives when personal loss and online remembrance increasingly overlap.
