Ferenc Gr贸f & Zs贸fia Gyenes: Magnificent Shades of Us. A Spectral Glossary
If there is a period in history that is painted grey on a grey background, it is definitely ours.
People make their own history, even if it is through the media vacuum of touch screens, but never freely, according to their own choices, but directly following ready-made, inherited patterns and pre-given circumstances. The tradition of all the dead and shadow generations weighs like a nightmarish burden on the living, and just when it seems that they are working to transform themselves and the situation, to create something that has never existed before, it is precisely in such times of crisis that they summon the ghosts of the past to serve themselves, borrowing their names, their slogans, their costumes, to stage a new farce of world history in such archaic, venerable disguises and borrowed language.
The exhibition of new collaborative works by Ferenc Gr贸f and Zs贸fia Gyenes evokes some of the forgotten shadows of the recent past that still haunt us today: the ultra-left opposition of the former socialism, the official revolutionary museum of the same regime, the Hungarian Museum of the Labour Movement, whose foundations have now been dug up and destroyed by an obscure neo-neo-Renaissance sect, and an anarchist theoretical work published as samizdat. The exhibition is a kind of glossary, a collection of phonemes of a grammar in need of reconstruction. One is not born a ghost, but becomes one.
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If there is a period in history that is painted grey on a grey background, it is definitely ours.
People make their own history, even if it is through the media vacuum of touch screens, but never freely, according to their own choices, but directly following ready-made, inherited patterns and pre-given circumstances. The tradition of all the dead and shadow generations weighs like a nightmarish burden on the living, and just when it seems that they are working to transform themselves and the situation, to create something that has never existed before, it is precisely in such times of crisis that they summon the ghosts of the past to serve themselves, borrowing their names, their slogans, their costumes, to stage a new farce of world history in such archaic, venerable disguises and borrowed language.
The exhibition of new collaborative works by Ferenc Gr贸f and Zs贸fia Gyenes evokes some of the forgotten shadows of the recent past that still haunt us today: the ultra-left opposition of the former socialism, the official revolutionary museum of the same regime, the Hungarian Museum of the Labour Movement, whose foundations have now been dug up and destroyed by an obscure neo-neo-Renaissance sect, and an anarchist theoretical work published as samizdat. The exhibition is a kind of glossary, a collection of phonemes of a grammar in need of reconstruction. One is not born a ghost, but becomes one.
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