“I live between two countries, I have four citizenships, but since my parents were Hungarian, and I also lived here during the most important period of my life, from eight until I was thirty-two years old, the commitment to this nationality is natural for me.”

Currently living in London, the photographer Mari Mahr (1941) was born in Santiago de Chile of Hungarian patronage. Her exhibition Two Walking presents two of her series connected to her late husband, Graham Percy.

The New Zealand-born artist, illustrator, typographer, and designer was her partner in her everyday as well as artistic life for thirty-five years. The images taken during her husband’s serious illness and even after losing him are a testament to the irrevocability of both pain and death, life’s natural companion; yet, they also demonstrate the creative force within.

Poems written by the New Zealand poet-couple Gregory O’Brien and Jenny Bornholdt to her poems are integral to the exhibition.

Personal involvement and the presentation of experiencing, understanding, and processing events through complex images have always been present in Mari Mahr’s oeuvre. These ‘collage-photos’ cannot only be considered a continuation of some creative heritage but also their renewal. Living a life of cultural diversity, the symbolism therein become a whole in her images. Combining her private world of mysteries, Latin American magic realism blends in with elements of Eastern and Western European reality.

In her two series the cities of Edinburgh and Paris are sites where, in the wake of the walks together, memories gain a new life and the potential past emerges. In this world of construed scenes everything has a story and a meaning; here proportions get transformed and objects of remembrance obtain a different sense of importance along with new meanings in relation to each other.