Till Death Do Us Part – Kriszta Nagy | Hybrids in the Carpathian Basin –A Sample of the Iroquois Collection | Convoy Leipzig – The Leipzig School | The Dream Barricade – A Show by Igor and Ivan Buharov, Miklos Onuchan, Svätopluk Mikyta, and Péter Szabó | Tact – A Show by Péter Forgács
INTERVIEW
Ágnes Bihari: Till Death Do Us Part – Kriszta Nagy
The Prince has come to take Kriszta Nagy who now presents the latest half-year chapter of her life in the low-ceilinged rooms of Godot Gallery.
Is what we can see at the show (snapshots made at various venues of a newly-wed couple dressed ’alternatively’) an artistic project of some sort, or indeed your very own life? The female on the snapshots is clearly you. Have you really got married?
This show is a Feminist cry rather than a manifesto without being embedded in any facet of today’s actual Feminism. I simply had to cry out that, yes, I want to be a wife for all the things Feminism has done to me or for that matter to any other female living today. I could become a painter, yes, and I can work, but still I want to be a wife, too. I have been involved in a very personal kind of art ever since I started. My art has been my life, and my life has been my art. This particular show is different from most preceding ones in that it is optimistic and colourful. I haven’t been happy too often. I think life is a ghastly affair, with only drops of happiness here and there. Once you become familiar with this fact, you can be more comfortable even with your difficulties. People have liked what I have been doing, the pictures, the lyrics, also my singing, because through all of those they have been able to deal with their own problems somewhat better.
In other words, the nine photographs we can see at the Godot Gallery were made during a drop of happiness in your life?
Yes, there was a drop of happiness, also some elation, but my life has not become any happier in the process. Those are only photographs after all.
You have hung beadlets upon the happy moments captured on those snapshots. Do they serve as quotation marks?
I have sewn beadlets on my pictures for ten years. I started using them in an extremely hard and painful period of my life. I was almost dead for example when I worked on my picture called Corpus Christi. I was both Christ on the Cross, and Mary removing Him. There, I embroidered beadlets to read “Corpus” and “X-T” on the canvas. What is important with beadlets is that one has to sew them on. Sewing them on properly into a hard painter’s canvas is extremely hard woman’s work. Today, many others use beadlets but they glue them on. I opted for sewing because I wanted my pictures to last at least a hundred years without disintegrating.
When did you decide to make this series of photographs. Before, during, or after the wedding ceremony?
As soon as I remained on my own with my pictures.
As you were looking at your wedding photos at home?
No. You must understand this in an abstract sense. When I was alone with my photos, without my husband being at my side. What I want to convey with this show is that rather than being masculine, I want to be a wife. I got married on 18 December and my half-year anniversary was in mid-June. At this very moment I am undergoing a… how should I say…
A crisis?
Something like that. I haven’t talked about this in the media, but this is one of the reasons why I want to go on with this stuff.
And so these works of yours spring from your unhappiness just like your previous ones?
Yes. However, since I got my degree I have tried to believe throughout that an artist shouldn’t work because he/she is starving or because he/she is despondent. I have always thought that an artist can work out of happiness.
PREVIEW
Hybrids in the Carpathian Basin –A Sample of the Irokéz Collection
10 October – 20 November
MODEM – Modern and Contemporary Arts Centre, Debrecen
This private collection (Irokéz Collection) is the only Hungarian collection of remarkable art history relevance to have been formed after the political change of 1989-1990. The selection process stresses the theoretical relevance of the pieces on view adding such provocative anthropological, psycho-analytical, and technological angles that can help reveal the dissonances from preceding art through the concepts of symbolism, imaginariness, and the real.
Convoy Leipzig – The Leipzig School
10 September – 22 October
Biksady Gallery
Over 50 pieces by 20 Leipzig artists present many diverging stances of representation with a lot of elements in common. Most pieces are paintings on paper or canvas, and there are a lot of colours to be relished. There are also references to the genres of cartoons and film-making.
Barricade of Dreams – A Show by Igor and Ivan Buharov, Miklos Onuchan, Svätopluk Mikyta, and Péter Szabó
8 September – 22 October
Trafó – House of Contemporary Arts
Do contemporary artists still have dreams in an age that needs instant responses in the face of urgent social and political realities? This international exhibit looks for an answer to the question whether there can be art beyond the frontiers of merely documentary responses to a social present? Is the free association language of Surrealism really bankrupt? Are the absurd juxtapositions of collages really outdated? Are the poetic qualities of Conceptualism still attainable?
Tact – A Show by Péter Forgács
8 September – 15 October
Erika Deák Gallery
Péter Forgács is an internationally renowned media artist. In the Erika Deak Gallery he exhibits three deeply connected series, 14 photographs, 7 videos and 7 paintings. His videos are “Zen” diaries, imprints of his personal observations. The biggest surprise of the exhibition is certainly Forgács’s painting series. Even though he had studied to be a sculptor at the Fine Art Academy, in the 1970’s Forgács put his paintbrush down to make films. After 15 years he decided to paint again. The primary inspiration of his paintings is the moving images of this exhibit. Everything connects to everything else here, everything has many layers to interpret – even beauty can’t be intact from the moods of our present times. Forgács’s freedom reaches its highest here; a portrait is perfectly conveying the mood, just as the gaze expresses the fear, or as the movement expresses the curiosity. Forgács’s brushstrokes are convincing, and the observer has to realize that even after all this time, the paint and the brush do exactly what Forgács wants them to do.