THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CHILDHOOD

The material remnants of school years like the different certificates, report cards, and textbooks are preserved as administrative proof of development and achievement. Alongside these institutional documents, family photographs and personal image archives also become part of the paper-based landscape of our childhoods memory, intertwining private histories with the visual and bureaucratic structures of education. Over time, these objects lose their original function: from instruments of evaluation and family remembrance, they become remnants of memory and institutionalized upbringing.

In her exhibition, Zsuzsanna Ida Papp reactivates these paper-based and photographic archives to examine the figure of the model student, a child shaped by expectations of creativity, adaptability, discipline, and continuous performance. The exhibited materials function simultaneously as documents and as evidence, while gradually losing their institutional authority. Through manipulative techniques familiar from school arts-and-crafts classes — paper weaving, collage, pencil drawing, embroidery — certificates, childhood drawings, school photographs and family images transform into distorted and absurd compositions.

The exhibition takes its title from Neil Postman’s 1982 book, which describes childhood as a historically developed condition of modernity. According to Postman, childhood cannot be viewed merely as a biological stage of life, but rather as a system of gradual initiation into adult society—a society distinguished from that of children by its ability to use and recreate printed media. Childhood thus becomes a space for discipline, cultural conditioning, and the postponement of entry into the adult world. 

The works reflect on educational and familial structures in which not only behavior, but time itself becomes regulated: time must be organized, used productively, and never wasted. Within this logic, childhood appears less as a space of play or idleness than as a continuous process of preparation, self-management and discipline. At the same time, the exhibition raises the possibility that this structured educational perspective may also obstruct later artistic liberation. While creative practice in adulthood could emerge from childhood free play and self-directed activity — where creation is inseparable from play. 

(Text by Luca Fábián)

Zsuzsanna Ida Papp (Zsuzsanna Somogyi, 1998) is a Hungarian visual artist, art educator, and cultural worker based in Bratislava, Slovakia. Her practice is grounded in artistic research and combines community-based and independent projects, often blurring the boundaries between genres and media. Her work draws on personal experience to address broader themes such as Eastern European and female identity, visual and spiritual heritage, family, peasant culture and folklore, ecology.

She holds a Master’s degree in Visual Culture Education from ELTE and has pursued fine art studies in Slovakia (Trnava) and Slovenia (Maribor). She has had solo exhibitions in Slovakia and Hungary, and has participated in group exhibitions in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and the United Kingdom. Most recently (in May 2026), she exhibited at the Photo London art fair.