The Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center awaits visitors with a new exhibition, MEOW!, between 15 July and 30 August. Entry is free.

"If a single image were to illustrate the essence of the 21st-century waves of digital images undulating through the channels of the World Wide Web, it would certainly be a cat photo. Despite being disputed by dog lovers to this day, the quasi-official mascot of the Internet has become the mysterious, self-contained, soft, furry kitty cat. Beside the animal’s obvious beauty and sweetness, Felis catus owes its immeasurable popularity in contemporary visual culture to features such as its human facial expression, glamorous intelligence, relentless curiosity, unaffected humour, constant unpredictability and aristocratic nature. The multiple layers of meaning related to the cat are constantly accruing since its domestication. Taming the cat was a legendarily long process, and in the millennia that have passed since its beginning, the feline companion of man has become a complex animal symbol – it is a playful, candid and childlike creature, the archetype of tranquillity. It is the night itself, the animal of esoteric knowledge, the epitome of acumen, a symbol of femininity, an icon of lust. Considering all this, the cat photo genre seems to be predestined to popularity. The MEOW! exhibition features a tiny segment of the world’s ever-expanding archive of kitten images. The collection of photos by nine contemporary Hungarian artists, photojournalists, photographers and artists, are accompanied by their short personal anecdotes about feline-human and human-human relations, aspects of image theory, sociological observations, superstitions, obsessions, eyes and whiskers." (Emese Mucsi, curator)

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