Stela Csizmazia
MA contemporary photography; philosophies and practices
Central Saint Martins UAL
Specialisms: Installation/Sculpture / Fine Art / Photography
Location: Bratislava, Slovakia
Stela Csizmazia
First Name: Stela
Last Name: Csizmazia
Specialisms: Installation/Sculpture / Fine Art / Photography
Sectors:
My Location: Bratislava, Slovakia
University / College: Central Saint Martins UAL
Course / Program Title: MA contemporary photography; philosophies and practices
About
Stela Csizmazia (Morphine) is a Slovak-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice is shaped by inheritance, fracture, and the quiet, persistent weight of memory. Grounded in nearly a decade of photographic inquiry, her work fluidly traverses boundaries between mediums, expanding into sculpture, installation, moving image, and performance art. These explorations unfold into multi-sensory realms, reaching beyond visual representation into emotional, ancestral, and bodily territories.
Stela’s artworks speak through intimate encounters between organic and inorganic materials—steel and fabric, stone and skin—each element resonating with its own history, memory, and emotional charge. The resulting works hold both tenderness and tension, embodying the unresolved intricacies of personal and collective identity. Through deliberate gestures of rupture and repair, she creates spaces in which contradictions coexist and reverberate: comfort alongside pain, silence against scream, purity intertwined with contamination.
Her practice is deeply rooted in exploring complexities of identity, hybridity, and remembrance, drawing strength and vulnerability from her multicultural background and the tensions it inherently carries. Employing both analog and advanced digital methods, Stela’s creative process reveals emotional residue, ancestral connections, and domestic rituals through materials that are personal, symbolic, and tactile.
Stela’s artworks speak through intimate encounters between organic and inorganic materials—steel and fabric, stone and skin—each element resonating with its own history, memory, and emotional charge. The resulting works hold both tenderness and tension, embodying the unresolved intricacies of personal and collective identity. Through deliberate gestures of rupture and repair, she creates spaces in which contradictions coexist and reverberate: comfort alongside pain, silence against scream, purity intertwined with contamination.
Her practice is deeply rooted in exploring complexities of identity, hybridity, and remembrance, drawing strength and vulnerability from her multicultural background and the tensions it inherently carries. Employing both analog and advanced digital methods, Stela’s creative process reveals emotional residue, ancestral connections, and domestic rituals through materials that are personal, symbolic, and tactile.
White Room is an installation exploring family heritage, multicultural identity, and the emotional burdens passed through generations. At the centre of this piece lies a bed wrapped in bedsheets passed down from my grandmother and mother, holding their traces: blood, sweat, and tears - as a physical archive of our shared history. Stones collected from important family homes and significant places in my life sit beneath the sheets, symbolising the weight and pressure of carrying multiple cultural identities. I was inspired by my personal experience of living between cultures and feeling the tension of belonging and not belonging simultaneously. I wanted to highlight how identity can be both comforting and heavy, and how the pressure to fit into clear cultural categories can feel sterile and restrictive, like being trapped in a clinical "white room“. The production involved physically embedding meaningful objects into domestic materials. I hand-built the bed frame, intentionally breaking and then welding it back together, leaving visible scars to symbolise the deep wounds from imperfect process of healing by reconciling different parts of our identities. Underneath the sheets, a hidden video plays a recording of me weeping, emphasizing personal vulnerability beneath a calm surface; while other piece of cloth hides a performance of me wrestling a pillow, becoming a quiet battlefield. A bedside table built from a gabion basket becomes both burial and container for my soul. White Room invites viewers to consider their own hidden stories, unspoken burdens, and the emotional impact of belonging to multiple worlds. The bed, usually a symbol of rest and comfort, here becomes a place of tension. White Room aims not to provide answers but to create space for reflection on the complexities of identity, the unseen emotional weights we carry, and the delicate balance between holding on and letting go.
Competitions
Global Creative Graduate Showcase 2025
A schism is a split or division between strongly opposed sections or parties, caused by differences in opinion or belief. In Christianity, a schism occurs when a single religious body divides and becomes two separate religious bodies. The project started forming in the summer of 2022 when my partner and I were forcefully separated by her parents because of cultural and religious differences. My partner, as a Muslim woman, was not accepted and allowed to have a romantic relationship with another woman. Forbidden to communicate with each other, I started researching the "gap" between us. The Schism is a long-term project mapping the split between two physical bodies, that caused my own, personal split. The work consists of interdisciplinary works exploring my relationship between god and my estranged partner. Gradually, this work becomes my personal, liberating ritual mapping my religious journey and conversion from Christianity to Islam.
Competitions
