ACCUMULATIONOF MATTER

Common physical processes occurring in nature used to in-form discourses on society, ever since the reification of the “human material” set up a disciplinary subject. These dynam-ics like accumulation, layering, stratification, consolidation or crystallization of raw materials are also engineering their way around how we think about the constructedness of grand narratives (class, nation, culture, ideology etc.) in human history. With the act of translation between the two domains (anthropologisation of natural materials and naturalization of communal matters) however, true knowledge on the mechan-ics can get lost, deliberately obscured and re-purposed by any powerful will. Accumulation of Matter features artistic projects that open up an interplay between intrinsic organic formations and in-terested human agents. The once neutral ‘earth-old things’ newly re-framed as national heritage, tourist site, battlefield, ethnic land, destination of group pilgrimage or party emblem easily conform to institutionalized geomythologies. Contem-porary artists - taken up the role of social interaction design-ers - infuse their praxes to survey the socio-spatial terrain. The exhibition invites to (re)discover these ideological land-marks inscribed on the highest peaks of the Carpathian Basin (Alps-Tatras-Carpathians).

INTRO

OHO GROUP

OHO Group / Naško Križnar, Triglav still frames, b/w, mute, 8 mm, 4’26’’

The symbol in question is Mount Triglav, which, standing at 2,864 metres, is the highest mountain in Slovenia and the Julian Alps. The name (“tri”, three and “glave”, heads) would appear to derive from its characteristic three-pointed shape, though some link it to a three-headed divinity from Slavic mythology. Traditionally the mountain is one of the symbols of Slovenia, though it took some time to become an official icon. Mentioned in one of the most popular patriot-ic songs (Oj, Triglav, moj dom by Jakob Aljaž), Triglav only appeared on the Slovenian flag in 1991, in place of the red socialist star, when the country left the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It did, however, appear in military insignia as of the post war period. Around 2003 the design of the flag, too similar to the Slovakian flag, was called into question; nothing was done, but it is significant that the winning sketch was based entirely on the stylized outline of the mountain. In January 2007, Mount Triglav put in an appearance on Slovenia’s 50 euro cents coin. We are therefore dealing with a national symbol, but that of a nation whose recent history is considerably tormented.

On 30 December 1968, at the Zvezda Park in Ljubljana, three members of the group OHO (Milenko Matanovi, David Nez, and Drago Dellabernardina) donned a heavy black sheet which reached down to their feet, leaving only their faces visible. The performance – in actual fact little more than a tableau-vivant – was entitled Mount Triglav. The new-ly-founded group was set to become one of the most inter-esting players in the brief season of the Slovenian artistic neo-avantgarde. Having started life with an open artistic identity, as an interdisciplinary context hosting different practices, in 1969 OHO set about forming a genuine artistic collective, working on the confines between conceptual art, performance and process art. An anti-art stance soon began to predominate, and between 1970-1971 OHO evolved into a kind of hippy commune, in an attempt to take the fusion of art and life to extremes.

OHO GROUP

The OHO story is emblematic of a very particular phase in Slovenian art, in which protests against the art market and the work of art as object, and the anarchist, libertari-an stance of the international neo-avantgarde movements, were expressed in a particularly extreme way, something that enabled the art scene in Slovenia, unlike in other contexts, to avoid being integrated into the system. Mount Triglav is emblematic of this attitude: OHO takes on the task of “embodying” a national symbol, at a time in which the nation’s dream of self-determination appears painfully sub-jugated to a utopia under threat. And even though the long hippy hair of the performers does introduce a note of paro-dy, the members of OHO are careful not to give their perfor-mance any specific ideological connotations. Mount Triglav still appears as impenetrable as the rock face of the symbol it incarnates. As Katie Kitamura writes, “OHO’s performance seemed both to inhabit the national symbol and to claim it for itself, replacing the anonymous peaks of the mountain with the faces of 1960s’ counterculture.” [2] Beyond other more historic connotations, like their conceptual aptitude for working with language, as noted by Miško Šuvakovi, and the “objectification of the human”, highlighted by Kitamu-ra, what strikes us about this work, and justifies the sub-sequent re-enactments, is the deconstruction and recon-struction of the symbol. The performance interferes with a symbol, and creates another: the tiny blurred photos of the event are an emblem of performance art in the sixties and seventies – more interested in the process than the object – and in the construction of an event more than its duration over time; they are also artistic fetish objects. Precisely in view of their neglected, anti-aesthetic feel and non-me-diated character, these objects are ideal witnesses to the authenticity of an event that, at a distance, has acquired an almost sacred status.

These images, like many others which document early performances, are like the relics of saints: their aura is not self-made, but acquired, independently of the intentions of those who produced them.

NEMANJA CVIJANOVIC

Nemanja Cvijanovic: Mount Triglav on The Adriatic Sea, 2010

NEMANJA CVIJANOVIC

Mount Triglav on The Adriatic Sea is a peculiar continuation of three happenings performed by Slovene artists, histor-ic and contemporary, using the idea of mount Triglav as an allegorical symbol of geography, nationality, and state, which possesses a historically constructed identity. The live sculpture Triglav was first performed in the Zvezda park in Ljubljana on December 30th 1968 by David Nez, Milenko Matanovic and Drago Dellabernardina, members of OHO, the most important neoavantgarde movement in Slovenia. The group IRWIN reconstructed this action in 2004, while in 2009 the artists Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša per-formed a happening they entitled Triglav on Triglav as a re-construction of the works of OHO and IRWIN with the intent of continuing conceptual art in Slovenia and exposing the ideological links of contemporary and past history.Allegorically, in Slovenia Mount Triglav is a symbol, its identity is artificially constructed and linked to the people and the country, while in Croatia the same holds for the Adriatic Sea. Mount Triglav on The Adriatic Sea attempts to deconstruct these identities and challenges the exclusive right of newly constructed neighbouring nations to make use of these symbols. Triglav on The Adriatic Sea was per-formed on June 2 during a 2010 DOPUST festival at the legendary Bacvice beach in Split, to show gratitude for the decision by Slovenia on the border arbitration referendum.

JANEZ JANSA, JANEZ JANSA, JANEZ JANSA

Janez Jansa, Janez Jansa, Janez jansa:Monument to the National Contemporary Art (Golden Triglav), 2008125 x 140 x 70 cm

JANEZ JANSA, JANEZ JANSA, JANEZ JANSA

In this context Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša appear. On 6 August 2007 they staged a performance en-titled Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav, which provisionally closes this matrioska-style story initiated by OHO in 1968. Slovenia has found itself a place in the new world order, and Mount Triglav has survived the transition intact, tak-ing pride of place on one of the coins that symbolizes the victory of capitalism. In recent years cracks have begun to show in the latter, but capitalist democracy seems to be the only available model, the model which countries recov-ering from the collapse of the great narrations attempt to evolve towards. The powers that be have developed such a strong resistance to criticism, that not only parody, but also over-identification, appear weak strategies. When they staged Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav, the three Janšas had just completed a long bureaucratic procedure enabling them all to take the same name: a name that also happened to belong to the then Prime Minister of Slovenia. While the three artists have always attempted not to reduce this operation to its purely political significance, claiming “personal reasons” for the change of identity, it becomes very difficult to exclude the political element when we see Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav. When “Janez Janša” tack-les the ascent of Mount Triglav (a sort of rite for Slovenians, something like Muslims going to Mecca) to re-stage the work of a hippy collective in the sixties, they create a kind of short circuit that nothing and no-one seems to come out of unscathed. With Janez Janša we are beyond over-identifi-cation as a performance strategy and resistance tactic; what we have here is an oblique attack which functions by anni-hilating the identity of the symbol: this affirms on one hand the power of the symbol itself, and on the other our resis-tance to its magnetism.

Davide Grassi, Žiga Kariž and Emil Hrvatin have cancelled themselves out to become Janez Janša, a living, transitory symbol of political power; and Janez Janša nullifies himself in Triglav, the eternal symbol of a nation. The work on the name of the mountain continues, and the “three heads” of OHO become one: that of Janez Janša, which is both single and trinity. This does not however imply that each renounces his own artistic [10] and national individuality. Like the three members of OHO who staged the original performance, the three Janezs are of different nationalities. In Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav, this fact is ironically underlined by the po-sition of the three heads and the direction of their gazes: the artist formerly known as Davide Grassi looks towards Italy, and the Croat Hrvatin towards Croatia, while the Slovenian Janez appears to look generally around.

GÁBOR ÖSZ

Gábor Ösz: Das Fenster, 20088 x 10 inch analogue black-and-white negative scanned, animated video

GÁBOR ÖSZ While I was preparing for the realisation of the film “Das Fenster”, I often browsed the internet for relevant webpag-es. This is how I came across post-War photographs, prob-ably taken by tourists, before the building was blown up in 1952. Maybe the reason they kindled my interest was that in this dark burnt-out locale, where once there was a window, now gaped an enormous rectangular hole, giving a strong radiant focus to this landscape framed in concrete. In this way, it was quite conceivable what Hitler meant when he said that the building was, in fact, constructed around the window. It seemed like the panoramic scenery itself was a picture, a projected image. It was not only suggested by the dark surroundings around the window, but the proportions of the window itself also reinforced the illusion of the movie theatre. It took some careful inspection to discover that the reason the whole frame of the window resembled a mov-ie screen was that its aspect ratio was close to 1.85:1, i.e., the aspect ratio of Cinemascope. Although in Hitler’s time, neither the technologies of the widescreen nor the Cinema-scope existed, it was almost as if the future of cinema had been forecast. To my even greater astonishment, the propor-tions of the inner divisions of the window frame, as it may clearly be seen in pre-War pictures, resembled the propor-tions of the traditional aspect ratio of analogue films, mea-suring 16 or 35 mm. In comparison to the traditional 3:4 as-pect ratio, the only difference here is in the window frame’s orientation, which is known as the portrait page, resulting in a ratio of 4:3. The ninety subdivisions of the window were combined into ten greater divisions of the same proportion. It may be interesting to mentioning that the English word “frame” is also used to describe a single picture on a film-strip, which here may give the impression that the whole of the window was constructed with the single frame ratio of the analogue film.

It is well known that Hitler, like so many other dictators, loved movies. Thus, it may not come as a surprise that be-side the movie-like format suggested by the window, a real movie screen was also included in the space. In the post-War pictures on the right side of the window we can clear-ly see the holes, behind which the hidden projectors were concealed. The great hall may rightfully be called the ma-chinery of a systematically arranged spectacle.Measuring four by eight metres, the panorama window was the central feature of the room, not only because of its size, but also on account of the impressive view it offered. The window opened directly onto Obersalzberg’s famous moun-tain, the Unterberg. The mystic aura surrounding this moun-tain dates back to mediaeval times. It conjures up myths about vanishing people, time warps, wonderful mountain dwarves and, according to a legend, even the emperor Charlemagne himself, who was said to be holding out in the mountain, waiting for his last great battle to be fought between good and evil (although the same story has also been told about Friedrich Barbarossa). During his visit, the Dalai Lama gave the mountain the name Sleeping Dragon, and declared it to be a place of worship. According to some accounts, the mountain had a great cave inside, complete with an underground lake, with a depth of one kilometre. It was on account of the mountain that Obersalzberg became the summer residence of Bavarian kings.Hitler always had a fascination for German mythology and the tales of great German conquerors alike. The mythical German history of the mountain constituted a reference frame for both the location of the Berghof and the windows themselves. He attributed magical powers to the moun-tain, regarding it as a great resource for ultimate victory. He seized it in the form of a political manifesto, wishing to exercise control and power over the landscape.

The images that I made using pictures found on the internet may be regarded as a series of sketches about the cine-matographic and visual meaning of the window. Drawings and notes about my investigations concerning the propor-tions are mixed with remarks on the notions of a fake obses-sion with the landscape. Is the question justified about the responsibility of a geographical location, and how historical events are related to the given landscape’s idyllic image?

SZABOLCS KISSPÁL

Szabolcs KissPál: Amorous Geography [etnozoo], 2014video, black school bloard, wall painting

SZABOLCS KISSPÁL Szabolcs Kisspál’s docu-fiction lays out the architecture and ethnographic space of Budapest Zoo, along with the long European history ob objectification of the Other and the post-Trianon discourse on Transylvania. The discourse constructs the otherness and identity of the region through a system in which Transylvania appears as the ultimate source of authentic and essential “Hungarianness”, while at the same as the place that is archaic, backwards and pre-modern. The double system of Transylvanian-Hungar-ian “pecularities” is thus a product of a colonial imagina-tion which, as an instrument for the symbolic occupation of space, bring the Other into being not merely as a subject of desire, but also of domination, in other words, as a ‘minia-ture replica’. (Zoltán Kékesi)

CRISTIAN RUSU

Cristian Rusu: The Alpine Project, 2007 - 2014model 1:200, cardboard, styrofoam, 6 collages framed in glasscourtesy of Galeria Plan B Cluj

CRISTIAN RUSU Cristian Rusu’s project exfoliates our projections of space; it interrogates the perceptual layers of spatial inscription and the cultural constructs they correspond to. As the scale of the project methodically expands (via studies of vastness and its emotional correlates, episodes of geometric alpine perfection, views of ‘figure’ or ‘ground’ that are more in-terested in blind spots than in what is made visible), the works articulate a reflection on the positions, rapports and attitudes that define, in opposition, landscape and archi-tecture, anxiety and the phenomenology of our ‘elsewhere’, the chaos of the object and the clarity of interpretation.For Cristian Rusu, nature is neither located at the fringes of the shrinking city, nor is it interspersed with failed uto-pian urbanism. Nature is not construed as site of allegori-cal damnation or as ecological safe haven, but as numbing isolation, a cut through the social tissue and territory of ethical disengagement. Architecture sculpts nature (a point brilliantly made by the work ‘Pavilion Tyrol’) and reclaims the ruin: in the animation presented at Plan B, the edi-fice-cum-monument is built only to show that it, the edifice, is not a ruin, and to do so in an ideological loop. Architec-ture is both power and entropy, it is spatial conflict.The triangular relationship that Cristian Rusu’s project trac-es between nature, architecture and subjectivity rewrites a constant preoccupation in the artist’s practice, an investi-gation of the contemporary condition of the sublime. While the experiences that test the limits of our imagination, that contradict or crush reason and could instill overwhelming terror abound, we lack Kant’s ‘safe place’, the situation of security from where the spectacle of the thunderstorm, be it natural or political, is surpassed by the sudden intensifica-tion of our moral engagement, by a feeling of infinite supe-riority to that which threatens to destroy us. (Mihnea Mircan)

GÁBOR CSONGOR SZIGETI

Gábor Csongor Szigeti: Reality Landscape, 2006 - 2015live stream, TV, webcamera, internet

GÁBOR CSONGOR SZIGETI turing land1The Reality Landscape-project draws on the notion of medi-ated technological images that are streamed in real time in HD resolution without a manipulating, editing or recording hand. The project adapts the orthodox, academic genre of landscape painting to the highest end technology of today, exploiting the current urge for the immediacy of things, interconnectedness and closed-circuit monitoring. The view of a specific terrain is constantly streamed via a web cam-era placed outdoors, transmitting the image to the gallery space. The symbolic possession of a place was accountable for the likes of landscapes ever since, the idea that also rooted in the hearts of the bourgeois individual when deco-rated their homes with representations of factual (historical) or constucted (mythological) ancestry.

1 I refer to art world -- galleries, majormuseums, prestigious art journals -- as Duchamp-land, in analogy with Disneyland. I will also refer to the world of computer arts, as exemplified by ISEA, Ars Electronica, SIG-GRAPH art shows, etc. as Turing-land). (Len Manovich)

2 Fortunately we live on the basis of a vital illusion, on the basis of an absence, an unreality, a non-immediacy of things. Fortunately, nothing is present or identical to itself. Fortunately, reality does not take place. Fortunately, the crime is never perfect. (Jean Baudrillard)

LÖRINC BORSOS

Lörinc Borsos: Unreal Ground, 2013engraved beech, beewax, 106 x 40 x 30 cm

LÖRINC BORSOS The project focuses on the commonplace topic of football as a metaphor of social dialogue. Through this aspect, such phenomena can be analysed that otherwise would be impossible among humans due to social, political or religious disagreement. These situations are demonstrat-ed through specially transformed pitch-models where the games become absurd in various ways. To these confusing pitches are invited symbolically the actors of our society’s conflict, according to the nature of the dispute to be able to dislocate themselves - by the commonly experienced game and comic - from the insistence to their own aspects. The new aspect of the debate may give motivation to un-derstand the other side and offers room for interpretation.

LITTLE WARSAW

Little Warsaw: Element, 1999bronze, 75 x 75 x 60 cmFerenc Karvalits Collection

LITTLE WARSAWGeorg Simmel thinks the most important element in the mental act of converting a phenomenon into a landscape is demarcation, inclusion in a momentary or enduring horizon. A landscape is definite, there is nothing acci-dental about it. It is in a way an anthropomorphisation of nature, an act with its own peculiar dynamics, facilitat-ing the agreement of things apparently contradicting one another, an odd mixture of momentariness and eternity, of the values of the petit bourgeois and metaphysics. It is created in the viewer’s subjective sensory experiences, which in Péter Nádas’s view begins with wonder, an emo-tion, “to become an object, and through it, a relation”.Two works from Little Warsaw from 1999 deal with a spe-cial segment of the landscape: the mountain. The issues of describability and representability position the relief and the sculpture as one another’s continuations and complements. Mountain is a romantic image of a cliff, an almost imperceptible bulge on a crumbling graph-ite plate, where layers have been removed. The fleeting image reflected on the shiny graphite surface, different from each viewpoint, is a visionary sight of a sublime and unapproachable mountain. The freestanding Element is a portrait-scale bronze sculpture, which attempts to give a more general, fuller description of the mountain. It is a partial reproduction and an allegoric portrait at the same time. Havas and Gálik did not use concrete models for either work, neither mountain reflects particular experi-ences; both try to capture the “ur-image” of the moun-tain that lies latent behind all those many pictures and representations. The medium-sized sculpture is the first three-dimensional form Havas and Gálik shaped together, re-carving time and again each other’s work, and do-ing the casting together: “All along we felt we lacked in experience as sculptors, we redid the whole thing even the night before the casting. We polished it ourselves, we almost set about re-carving the bronze cast, and even at the exhibition we felt it was completely dilettantish”.

Little Warsaw: Path, 2011painted plaster, photo on cardboard, wood 40 x 62 cm

This was the only work exhibited in the room of the studio gallery in Paulay Ede Street, renovated for this occasion. The carefully designed interior, the intentionality of the representation separated the work process of the sculptor into phases, and treated them as independent meanings. This included the size of the sculpture, that of a normal portrait, just as it did the planning of the environment. The foundation and reference for the rhetoric space is the historical space of the gallery of the former Képcsarnok Vállalat, the organization whose function was to present art. The sculpture was placed on a simple white plinth, with the Little Warsaw logo in the background, which appeared here for the first time. Element was the result of four years’ work, and the audience encountered the completely elab-orated artistic vision that was to mark all later production of Little Warsaw. The situation offered for its audience with this single sculpture and environment raises similar is-sues to Katharina Fritsch’s Museum, presented at the 1995 Venice Biennale. In his interview with the artist Matthias Winzen is quick to point out this work, which he thinks is a utopia of cultural politics, in which the museum appears not as a place of leisure but a purified point where the audience can be intellectually confronted. Fritsch placed the work on such a tall plinth that the viewer could not get a comprehensive view of it. The arrangement of Museum, its operation in space, its peculiar appropriation of space, presented the unreachable as the image of distance. In an interview with contemporary Hungarian sculptors the issue was raised whether a sculpture must necessarily be provoc-ative. While this is a question more obviously pertinent in the case of Fritsch’s work, the intent to create the same threshold experience informs the work of Little Warsaw, prompting it to involve the viewers in situations in which they are obliged to step out of the stereotypical routines of the experience – i.e. of meeting a work of art – and ask simple questions like “Where are we anyway? What space is this around us? What are we doing here?” Beside the far-from-easy attempt to cancel routine, these situations “pro-voke” the audience to shed their manic obsession with the describability of the work, a source of a feeling of security and control.

MARKO TADIC

Marko Tadic: The booksartist book, paper, drawing

MARKO TADIC The idea of journey has for a number of years been one of the focal points of Marko Tadic’s works ranging from souvenirs, postcards, cartography – imaginary geograph-ical maps, forgotten or imagined scenes, narratives in travelogues – in animated films, drawings, collages, in-stallations, spaces of imagined, possible and impossible journeys through various possible and impossible places. Marko Tadic builds phantasmagorical stories with just a hint at narration, where he sketches possible, imagined, fictional worlds.He intervenes into the scenes of found vintage postcards with simple drawings and collaging of elements with min-imal gesture, thus creating a fairytale narrative between the known and the unknown, fact and fiction, mixed into an organic whole with quotes from art history, tales, film or literature. The works are shaped at the crossroads of drawings, collages, appropriated photographs, installa-tions, animation and they are determined by an interest for archive, daily life, decorativeness, the aesthetics of B films and silent horrors he uses to construct a peculiar mood of oblivion. He processes and mixes a variegated archive of images of various origin, stressing the possibil-ities of reinterpretation and the relation to the past.In his collages and drawings Marko Tadic builds a frag-mentary narrative telling the story of film, while the spec-tacle of cinematography and its “construction”, i.e. the stressing of its constructed character, become a referen-tial field of these works. The works represent an interpre-tation of drawing in two media: collage and animated film, bringing forth two levels of image – static and moving.Branca Brencic

SVATOPLUK MIKYTA

Svatopluk Mikyta, installationmixed media

SVATOPLUK MIKYTA In the 19th century, Central Europe experienced a wave of Na-tional Revivals, which were heavily influenced by national my-thology. Only now can we differentiate between the two – for a long time, national mythology and national history were revered as one and the same thing. It was not only unpopular, but also unacceptable, to question this presumption. As a result, national identity was part truth, part historical manipulation. Since then, we have radically revised our history, and would like to believe that the present is more objective than the past. However, new mythologies replace old ones, and history must be constantly scrutinized and reinterpreted. In his works, artist Svätopluk Mykita puts history to the test. Mykita is a member of the post-revolution generation, a gener-ation that has had the chance to travel and study abroad in the West. His work comes out of these circumstances – it is the artis-tic testimony of a generation. Mykita is a tireless artist, creating vast thematic cycles and archives of his works. His work largely centers on two major themes. First, Mykita has a strong interest in Slovak history and identity. Secondly, he explores the fate of the individual – including himself – within the context of the time. He explores these themes using “inconspicuous” media – drawings, ceramics and installations – thus creating a subtle personal history. Despite his nomadic lifestyle, Mykita’s work reflects his strong attachment to Slovakia. Slovak mythology is full of symbols – Slovak shepherds, Jánošík (the famous Slovak national folk hero), beautiful mountainous nature, hard-working people, young lads and maidens in national costume, herds of sheep and symbols represent the goodness of the Slovak people. They illuminate national history, invoke patriotic pride, and justify a meaningful national existence.

Still, mythology often reflects the historical successes or loss-es of a nation. With an agrarian past and without much heroic history, affected by a millennium of political control from the outside, Slovaks easily succumb to this positive myth creation. In the communist period, socialist realism further emphasized the iconography of folk heroes. The popularity of these Slovak symbols is undeniable – they are still part of everyday life, even 150 years after the National Revival.1 In his work, Svätopluk Mikyta reevaluates present-day Slovak mythology in a process that utilizes irony as well as nostal-gia. He does not work iconoclastically with these symbols – but rather, he gives them new meanings. One of Mikyta’s symbolic subjects is the potato – an artifact linked to the life of the farm-er and to socialist agriculture. Mykita’s potatoes are usually sprouting, and their roots create various entanglements – the Slovak double cross, for example. Thus the potato, originally from South America, becomes a Slovak Christian potato. Mykita emphasizes his sarcasm by naming his works The Right Vari-ety or The Year of the Potato2 – names that could be found on plaques in an agricultural museum. However, at the same time, potatoes are very much a part of Slovak culture and history – in some parts of Slovakia, they fed many people during periods of famine. This celebration of the potato is part of a reevaluation of history. Mikyta adds: “the shape of the potato is also important – instead of it being a reg-ular sphere, it is an irregular sprout, which is a rather accurate description of us.” Other symbols are present in Mykita’s drawings: shepherds’ axes, arrows, ropes, double crosses, scythes, and sickles – these are everyday, but inherently Slovak, objects. Iconography with multiple historical connotations is usually given meaning through local contexts; the meaning of Mykita’s drawings un-doubtedly varies depending on the perspective of its viewer and his or her regional background. For an exhibition in Banská Bystrica3, Mykita drew symbols directly onto the walls of a Re-naissance vault in the gallery’s exhibition space. He used the same motif for the decoration of ceramics – and by linking

Slovak folk symbols with the Renaissance stucco, he created a decor reminiscent of Buddhist mandala. The layering of sym-bols and history is central to Mykita’s work. As a member of his generation, Mykita also confronts political and social issues in his work. In the installation Bubble, he reacts to the “marital” relationship between Slovak Christianity and communism. The rapid expansion of capitalism is the subject of a number of his works as well. Mykita’s idyllic mountain nature scenes feature the invasive McDonalds4 signs – which have a symbolic value all their own. His performance Shepherd’s Axe to the West was also a reaction to the uncritical consumption of Western models and the loss of national identity. The artist, dressed in folk costume, symbolically threw a shepherd’s axe from Bratislava’s Devin Castle in the direction of Austria. Although Mykita’s works have a critical undertone, they are of-ten questions rather than outright criticisms: “My intention is to unveil and seek out meaning – I try to work through an objective viewpoint. That takes time and a significant amount of material. For me, it is a systematic process that can be built upon after-wards by someone else.” In Mykita’s work, there is a visible ef-fort to admit personal responsibility for the world’s condition. In Shepherd’s Axe to the West, by styling himself as Ľudovít Štúr5, Mykita places the fate of his nation upon his own shoulders. Another of Mykita’s motifs is that of the individual devoured by the masses. To express this theme, the author uses his own technique, which he calls “over-drawing.” In these drawings, Mykita works directly with real historical material. With pen-cil and eraser, he draws on found material and prints from old books, which he cuts out himself. The works in the series, which were mostly produced abroad, often bear the name of their place of origin. (Lenka Kukorová)

SOCIÉTÉ RÉALISTE

Société Réaliste: Limes New Roman, 2009 - 201024 enamel plates, 30 x 15 each , Csaba Makra collection

SOCIÉTÉ RÉALISTE“Limes” is a latin word that modern historians gave to the sys-tem of Roman fortifications established all along the borders of the Empire. It physically signals limits between territories, in terms of customs as well as with defensive aims. This ter-minology has been revived for the creation of a typography, “Limes New Roman”, registered by the artistic cooperative So-ciété Réaliste and published in the Icon’s part of the issue #35 of the journal Multitudes, in winter 2009. This project forms a part of a corpus of cartographic experiments gathered under the French-neologism Pligatures1. This group of proposals ques-tions, by the decorative transposition, our world’s representa-tion in regard of History and more particularly maps produced with their bundles of uncertain information: “Quite often, fields of texts even than decorative elements deliberately cover some map’s areas about which we only had uncertain informations at the moment of the making of the globe”2.

The font “Limes New Roman” draws up a catalog of boundaries, security barriers, lines of control and barricaded checkpoints operating between states, in order to figure out the uppercases and then between districts for lowercase. It remains an incom-plete alphabet, interrupted to the minimum Latin form, which is lacking the ability to bring us the migratory effects on transmis-sion, language, the question of communication and information. This alphabet appears as a clever and silly game about relations between representation, enunciation and the notion of traces both historical and sociological. In fact, it is not new for Société Réaliste. Since their creation in 2004, the group involves itself in present and past political organizations in order to find again etymological and iconographical collusions.

MARK FRIDVALSZKI

Mark Fridvalszki ’’Hommage für das Material no. II.’’, 2015w/ appropriation of Borsos Lörinc ’’Dark Matter’’coal, paint box, enamal paint, wood panel, wallpaper, size variable

MARK FRIDVALSZKI The installation atmospherically depicts the poetics of the circulation of matter.Since the birth of our Universe, matter perpetually changes, aggregates, breaks, and alters. Matter persists or exists in a constant state of flux; matter is an intelli-gent structure and an organizing principle.In the three dimensional space, we are manifested through matter as well. Matter is familiar to us, we pre-sume to know it, both when observing it from the outside and when focusing on ourselves. Nevertheless, on a universal scale, matter (like fresh-water) is a rarity, the result of a long, patient process, and a particular con-stellation.In Hommage für das Material no. II. the invisible dark matter of the Universe metaphorically appears and cov-ers a pile of coal. The dominating cosmic matter spreads over ancient plants that eventually became our common source of energy, thus manifesting the planetary circu-lation of matter. Metallic tanks, as corporate Atlas sculp-tures hold their own content on a wooden plate in front of a black and white scenery, gradually vaporizing into geometrical forms.In this case Dark Matter, a work by Borsos Lörinc, is not as originally conceived pointing at the notions of power, liberation, and destruction through the marketing and selling of the artist’s black color, but becomes an appro-priated means to alienate the concept of matter. *In: Hommage für das Material no. II., written and edited by: Mark Fridvalszki, Krisztina Hunya, Leipzig 2015. (T+U)

KRISZTIÁN KRISTÓF

KRISZTIÁN KRISTÓFKrisztián Kristóf builds visions and deconstructs stories. Be it his drawings bent from ferroconcrete, his videos, anima-tions, or his dream-like graphics; by experimenting with various story-telling forms he creates a re-structured nar-rative with a permuted timescale based on condensation, emphasis and parallels.Krisztián Kristóf is an artist and the founder of the collec-tive “the randomroutines”. He is mainly interested in ex-perimenting collectively within a spectre that ranges from traditional graphic techniques to animation films. He is a master of animation in general and of flash animations in particular. When he isn’t creating and programming web-sites, he works on graphical novels, writing screenplays and composing music.

LE JEU DE LA GUERRE (GUY DEBORD)

Guy Debord: The Game of War, 1931 -1994boardgame, recommended w 2 players4 prototypes prouduced in metal

The French iconoclast Guy Debord tends to be known in America—if he is known at all—for two things, both of which peaked in the student movements of 1968, when he was thirty-six. Debord was a founder of the Situationist Interna-tional, an underground organization whose roots lay in Dada and cultural Marxism and whose whimsical slogans, creative defiance, and cryptic prose attracted dreamers on both sides of the pond. He was also a curmudgeon.Atlas Press has just rereleased A Game of War in a new English rendering by Donald Nicholson-Smith, a translator Debord appears to have trusted. The edition comes in a sleek box and includes, for long winter nights, a playing board and little punch-out pieces. It’s difficult to summarize. The board contains two facing territories of 250 squares each. Two of these per side are “arsenal” squares. (Active pieces, we learn, must be in “communication”—i.e., aligned, either directly or through intermediary pieces—with an arsenal.) Territories also include three “fort” squares (which raise a piece’s “defensive factor”—more on that in a second), nine “mountain” squares (impenetrable to all things), and one “mountain-pass” square (for penetrating the impen-etrable mountains). Each side has seventeen pieces—an array of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and communications. Players take turns, as in chess. Unlike in chess, they move up to five pieces per turn. Each piece carries a numerical “offensive factor” in addition to its defensive factor; when an attack is under way, offensive factors are summed and weighed against the defense, à la Risk. The game ends when a player’s fighting pieces or arsenals are gone. In the match Debord played with his wife, this took fifty-five moves. Ludologists and the extremely anal-retentive will be relieved to find that errors in the 1987 diagrams have been corrected. The rest of us will be glad just to get the rules down.

We didn’t doi t! Crew: (feat. Csaba Czékmán & Horror Pista)III. War of Factoryland, 119x262 cm, collage on paper, 2011

accumulation of matter© szilvi német 2015handbook to the exhibition_ / 50

cover design by márton bertókedited by szilvi német

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