ALL PHOTOS: Detail from the exhibition titled Trauma by Zsolt Asztalos, 2022, Artkartell projectspace
Photo: Dávid Biró
Asztalos is a mid-generation representative of the conceptual art scene. He started to work with the thematics of trauma in 2020. Behind things, places and systems painful memories may lurk, which are often hard to recall. People rather turn away, give up their integrity and reliability to cover and compensate for the truth. To save our integrity we need to face the traumas of our society and also ourselves.
The installation filling the exhibition area of Artkartell projectspace resembles a memory map with photos and texts pinned to guide us through three layers of human perception and remembrance.
Battlefields represents the individual dimension of historical remembrance. Asztalos applied photos of battlefields on boxes of abstract and realistic shapes, then took photos of these objects. The cold atmosphere of the exhibition space gives way to imagination, unveiling the simplifying mechanisms of our historical perception.
The representation of collective remembrance is continuing on the level of social traumas. Trauma is not only the tragic event itself but also the effect it has on the subject or society. The installation Traumatic Buildings is a complex, upsetting narration hidden behind monochrome minimalism. This traumatic scale model shows us the darkest mental constructs from the depths of the subconscious of Hungarian society.
The last object is Recording memories and it leads us to the deepest level of subjective experience. Through the process of memory mapping events of a day are represented in abstract forms. During communication the necessity of linguistic abstraction we lose the subjective character of the experience. The process of artistic work is represented as introspection: the tools of making, such as the creating hands and lighting are presented. The object of the work is not the feelings or thoughts of the artist but its own self. The piece is not about the creative process or self-expression but reception, in other words it's about the observer, not the artist. The artist steps back, giving light to show the distance between individual beings.
The exhibition ambitiously aims at representing a very rich narrative but at the same time making it clear that it is impossible to share. It concludes that visual representation is just as fragmented and equivocal as linguistic.
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Zsolt Asztalos was born in 1974, in Budapest. He graduated at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, as a student of Dóra Maurer. His works of art (installation, film, video, photo, graphics) focus on the processing of the past. He was awarded with prestigious international and Hungarian awards: Leopold Bloom award, Munkácsy award, Derkovits grant. With his work Fired but Unexploded he represented Hungary at the 55th Biannale of Venice. Zsolt Asztalos is represented by Molnár Ani Galéria.
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Curator: Marcell Pátkai
Sponsored by: PP Center Business Park
