Sewn Silence

The rabbit evokes a child’s plush toy. Its stitched-shut mouth refers to the enforced silence surrounding child abuse, while its soft cotton surface recalls vulnerability, innocence, and emotional fragility. The scale of the work transforms a familiar childhood symbol into an unsettling presence, where care and injury coexist within the same body.
On the sweater that covers the sculpture, surreal embroidered scenes appear, addressing themes of child abuse. These stitched images translate the everyday language of textile and care into a fragmented testimony, where violence is not rendered invisible, yet never becomes fully speakable. The material itself becomes evidence — fragile, tactile, and unresolved.
The work reflects on institutional failures and child abuse scandals within Hungarian state care systems, where social and political silence has repeatedly displaced accountability. Rather than documenting specific cases, it addresses collective denial, inherited trauma, and the normalization of silence surrounding abused children. It examines how systems of care can simultaneously operate as structures of concealment and erasure.
In a broader sense, the sculpture reflects on power structures that sustain silence through influence, bureaucracy, and institutional networks. From internationally known cases to unresolved Hungarian ones, the work points to how violence against children is repeatedly minimized, obscured, or absorbed into systems designed to avoid accountability.
Within these structures, children remain the most vulnerable participants: often unable to defend themselves, to articulate what has happened, or to seek help. The sculpture stands as a monument to these unspoken and unheard voices, confronting the viewer with a reality that persists across societies, cultures, and political systems.
The work offers no resolution, only presence: a body that cannot speak, yet cannot be ignored. It directs attention toward ethical responsibility — the duty of protection, and the visibility of those who are structurally rendered invisible by the systems surrounding them.