about the project

Work list Budapest 3/2017

 

János Brückner & Khansa Humeidan, Home – You Are Not Alone (2017), multimedia Installation

Azahara Cerezo, Principles of traceability (2017), prints

Marta Fišerová, Sleepless I kept the night (2017), video installation, 5’

Réka Lőrincz, O P E N (2017), installation & video, 3’

Marko Markovic & Sandro Đukić & Branko Cerovac,  The Naked Island (2016),  prints and video installation, 2’

Joe Joe Orangias, In Full Flow (2017), Prints

David Reumüller, Wallpainting o.T. (2017)

Kamen Stoyanov,  I am going to kill you (2017), video installation, 4’35

Katharina Swoboda, Center of the Earth (2017) Video 7’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

János Brückner & Khansa Humeidan

Home – You Are Not Alone (2017)

Multimedia Installation

 

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Representing crisis, war and precarity in a white cube gallery seems to be a contradiction. There are real

people, refugees, in real situations of war and violence and there are the other kind of people who walk

into a gallery to look at art about refugee and crisis topics. The gap between ‘them there’ and ‘us here’ becomes

deeper as people who are in the centre of crises and visitors of exhibitions become more detached

from each other.

It is, however, important to talk about the refugee crisis, it is important to make the precariousness that

hits all of us, visible, audible and touchable. Brückner and Humeidan don’t believe there should be a separation:

they want to dissolve the border that exists between people in various situations.

In their collaboration, they found that nothing is more important than the stories of people. In this case

stories that are connected to the concept of home – a core symbol of human precariousness.

The installation of Brückner and Humeidan is aimed at offering audiences a chance to step out of the

ideas and images we in Europe of the current violence, war and crisis: ideas and images that are mostly

deformed by what we have seen in the media. Telling stories and re-actualizing those stories as an audience

can encourage people to step out of the core contradiction of war at a white cube situation. It does

not matter from which country you are, or how people think about your country of origin. Brückner and

Humeidan will only look at people’s stories. The particular story that is part of ‘Home – You Are Not Alone’

is powerful not only because it is reflecting on your own ideas and images about war, but also because it

is a personal and honest recount.

 

János Brückner (1984, Budapest) lives and works in Hungary and Germany. Brückner studied Hungarian Language

and Literature at Eötvös Loránt University of Humanities, at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts,

majoring in painting and at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin where he obtained a postgraduate master

in Art in Context. Brückner gets inspired by pop culture; he is mainly interested in the representation of the

self, how one can identify or misidentify with the constant image flow of today’s world. He participated in

several solo and group exhibitions and was awarded the Derkovits Gyula Grant twice. www.brucknerjanos.com

 

Khansa Humeidan (1986, Moscow) lives and works in Berlin. She obtained her bachelor of Fine Arts, Design,

Calligraphy, Aesthetics and History of Art and her preliminary year Master at the Visual Communications

Department Art at the Damascus University and then studied Art in Context at the University of Fine Arts

in Berlin. Humeidan organized and participated in several workshops in Syria and Germany.

 

 

 

Azahara Cerezo

Principles of traceability (2017

Prints

 

 

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“The Jungle” refers to a series of camps around Calais, northern France. There is no trace of these camps

in Google Maps, even though the images seem to have been taken in 2016 and the refugees and migrant

camps in Calais have existed in various forms since 2002. Probably, this absence can be easily explained

as a mistake in the renewal frequency of the satellite imagery, since the camps do appear in other platforms

and sources. However, this slight dislocation in Google’s refresh rate contrasts with the progressive

omniscience of systems, devices and virtual platforms of vision. In this sense, the ways used by Google

cartographic services to collect imagery remind to colonizing logics and point to an ultimate intention to

possess the territory. As a transnational and powerful agent, this kind of tools are changing our relationship

with what is seen, what needs to be seen and how it is seen (algorithms, image patents, standardized

screen formats…).

 

As Saskia Sassen states, these kinds of globalizing processes are producing ruptures in the mosaic of border

regimes underlying the international system of exclusive territorial demarcations. In other words, “the

unleashment of capital transforms the world into a battlefield” according to El Pressentiment n.40, a project

by the philosophers Marina Garcés and Santiago López Petit.

In this context, frontlines are situated in less obvious places. This is the case of Western Sahara, an old

Spanish colony that was occupied by Morocco after non-completing a promised Referendum. The conflict

lasts for more than 30 years and part of the Sahrawi population still lives in refugee camps in the middle

of the desert. They are surrounded by a double border: the adobe and mines wall which physically divides

their land and, more important, the informative border that prevents from communicating their situation,

an invisible border difficult to break.

 

The Sahrawi refugee camps, the oldest in the world, are difficult to locate through platforms such as Google

Maps. It is easier to find a Google’s suggestion for the recent European refugee camps than for the

Sahrawi settlements. In fact, Google has mapped and taken photos from the main refugee camps in Europe

in Google Street View and it is even possible to leave a review of these places. It is a virtual gallery

that “directs” our look.

 

On the other hand, the permanence of the Sahrawi camps is not only a paradox or a weapon (Sahrawi

culture is composed by nomad cultures), but it could also give clues about displacement, temporary structures

and citizenship; in sum, about the potential future of Europe. Somehow, Western Sahara is a transitory

zone since 1975. The work focuses on the relationships between visible and invisible frontlines and

transitory zones within a context of increasing technical tools. It tackles these technical tools as power

hubs that condition our way of looking as citizens and conforms new coordinates within geopolitical strategies,

especially in Europe.

 

This project arises from the previous collaborations with Artifariti (International Encounters of Art and

Human Rights in Western Sahara) in which Cerezo participated through some of the satellite events. With

gratitude to Jose Iglesias Gª Arenal, Spanish artist and member of the curatorial team of Artifariti 2016.

Azahara Cerezo (Girona, Spain, 1988) explores urban forms and (in)visibility relations in the physical and

virtual public space through access and usage of data in real time, re-appropriation processes and strategic

displacements. Her work addresses contradictions in the territory’s singularity, whose physical dimension

is understood as liquefied by digitalization and other global dynamics. She shapes (often online) actions,

experimental videos and installations. Her projects are frequently linked to the production in context in the

frame of artistic residencies as well as to the collaboration with other artists. www.azaharacerezo.com

 

 

 

Marta Fišerová

Sleepless I kept the night (2017)

Video Installation (5’)

 

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The video is showing appropriated drone footage from destroyed Syrian cities. Both Judith Butler and

Susan Sontag discuss the effect of war photography. Fišerová sees the influence of time in both claims

as well as in images we are used to see today. The drone slights with smooth movements between the

rubble of houses and then flies up again above the city to show the scale of the destruction. A beautiful

picture, a terrifying view. With this footage, the image of war got a new dimension. The whole picture is

completed by a sad but pleading voice of an Arab woman reciting a poem that shows great sorrow about

the life she used to live and which will never be the same again. The poem is a lyrical parallel for Butler’s

thought about grievability and the precariousness of life.

 

Marta Fišerová (Brno, 1987) studied at the Faculty of Fine Art in Brno, with a focus on conceptual tendencies

and painting. She is a curator and a visual artist who works in multiple medias, ranging from installations

and objects to photography and video. She has participated in several individual and group exhibitions.

Fišerová‘s works can be read as critiques. The critiques of society, its phenomenons and processes,

partly also as critiques of art practice itself (dealing with the problem of the image). Her works are based

on a process of thinking and research: the form follows thoughts so materialization always depends on

concepts. Another key element that is always present in her art practice is storytelling: in her work the

story can be the concept but it can also be the work’s conclusion. Recently her works deal with the vague

feelings of cataclysm fatality. As a curator Fišerová works for the Gallery G99 in The Brno House of Arts, is

the founder and curator of Klubovna Gallery in the same city and a coordinator of Brno Artists in Residence.

http://martafiserova.com

 

 

 

Réka Lőrincz

O P E N (2017)

Installation & video (3’)

 

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The site-specific installation called O P E N aims to objectively visualize the constant changes in our world

such as the geographical growth of frames. The mandala map expanding from Central-Eastern Europe to

Afghanistan reflects the places of the migrant crisis affecting our age. During the vernissage visitors get

to experience the performance where the natural flow of the audience destroys the mandala. The work

expresses the constant change of limits, frames and even the future ending of our present situation.

 

The center of Lőrincz’ art practice is her interpretation of today’s world. She is looking for a kind of communication

between the outside world and that of her own, in aim to make the invisible visible. She is intrigued by the street,

 by what she sees there. Through her works, she is contemplating the tangled variety

of the universe. The inspiration she gets from her surroundings and the emotions and thoughts that pass

through her mind are the basis of her research and objects. Through her objects, she tries to reflect on

the difference between what is shown and the real world which can sometimes become appealing, fake or

even dangerous.  www.rekalorincz.com

 

 

 

Marko Markovic & Sandro Đukić & Branko Cerovac

The Naked Island (2016)

Video Installation (2’)

 

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The only ‘Gulag’ in Former Yugoslavia was founded in 1948, when Josip Broz Tito entered Yugoslavia

because of his conflict with the Soviet Union. The Naked Island was initially a detention center with the

purpose of re-education. People from all over Yugoslavia were brought here without legal procedure or

conviction and often didn‘t know the reasons and the logic of the global politics that brought them to the

island.

 

Ten years later the camp was converted to a high security prison and then into a jail for juvenile delinquents.

In the late 80s, in the time of political transition, the facility was closed and the new era began.

All the buildings on the island and infrastructure were presumably plundered by people from the neighbouring

island: all the inventory was probably used for the construction of the new touristic infrastructure.

After that a football hooligan group destroyed everything else.

The artists found this island a significant place of immanent violence – symbolizing the problem of violent

detention and unwilling replacement of people and individual freedom versus state politics and power.

This unsolved history had a big emphasis on the Croatian tradition of emigration: in recent years, the

amount of people who left the country increased epidemically and now half of the Croatian population

lives abroad. Though Croatia was harbouring half a million refugees from the nineties war, the climate

was and is still xenophobic.

 

Expedition and walking through the hush landscape on extremely hot day was the moment for the contemplating

movement on the unknown territories. At the peak of the Island, at the Stone Query, one feels

the spirit of the first settlers, who were dying working during forced labour. After an exhausting expedition

to unknown territories, climbing over sharp rocks the artists have confronted their body with the brutal

environment. Eventually we left and vanished.

 

Marko Markovic (Osaijek, 1983) believes that everybody has the obligation to point out and act in response

to certain circumstances and situations in his or her environment, especially when it comes to social injustice

and irregularities in the system. His work is socially engaged and directly involved with people and

their needs as well as with social structures. His work reflects on current events and questions the structure

of politics, economics, status and positions of inferiority and superiority. He uses a variety of media, such as

sculpture, video, installations, performances and happenings. http://markovichmarko.blogspot.hu

 

Sandro Ðukić (Zagreb, 1964) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and the Art Academy in Dusseldorf.

He makes spatial, architectonic and photographic installations and constructed films. The artist has

exhibited at numerous solo and collective exhibitions in all Croatian major art institutions and abroad in

Slovenia, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, the US, Italy, Serbia, Austria. As a lecturer, he participated

in several domestic and international symposiums. Ðukić is a member of Croatian Association of Independent

Artists HZSU and Croatian Association of the Visual Artists HDLU. www.sandrobukic.com

 

Branko Cerovac (Pula, 1958) is a freelance curator, philosopher and self-taught painter/performer. He creates

works in various techniques and genres: drawings and prints, painting and mixed-media works as well

as performances and events. Cerovac has worked as curator of the Modern Gallery Rijeka (Museum of Modern

and Contemporary Art) since November 1988 and he was involved in all major projects and actions of

MMC (O.K. Gallery.

 

 

 

Joe Joe Orangias

In Full Flow (2017)

Prints

 

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People fleeing conflict zones in the Middle East and northern Africa urgently need places to live. In Full

Flow examines the impact citizens have on pressuring state officials to pass progressive refugee policies.

After attending and learning from images of public vigils in solidarity with refugees, I have written and

sent a series of letters to governments for further advocacy. This exhibition features enlargements of my

mail to Hungary, Japan and the United States, and calls for citizen participation in building stronger frames

for refugee flows.

 

Joe Joe Orangias is a visual artist, activist and writer based between New York City and Geneva. His projects,

often collaborative and site-specific, focus on monuments, public space, queerness, decolonization

and sustainable development. He earned a MFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston (SMFA), and a BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Orangias has exhibited at

the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Gaffa Gallery, Sydney; Hinterconti Projects, Hamburg; Proof Gallery,

Boston; and the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, Hong Kong; among other venues. He was awarded

a SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship for research in Altera New Zealand; an Art School Alliance Fellowship

from the Hochstetler fur blende Kunzite Hamburg; and residencies at the Galveston Artist Residency,

Art342 in Colorado, RM Gallery in Auckland and Atelier OPA in Tokyo. He has published writing in Temporary

Land Bridge and Scope: Contemporary Research Topics (Art: 11). He also makes projects as part of the

collaborative Orangias+Eshraghi. www.joejoeorangias.com

 

 

 

David Reumüller

Wallpainting o.T. (2017)

 

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The interpretation of the wall painting presumably tells more about the viewer than about the image itself.

Each viewer will perceive the landscape in a subjective way, only through the individual interpretation

the data of the image becomes information. The ability to recognize patterns is the basis of selective

perception, which allows us to assign information. The selective perception, however, depends on socialization,

feelings and context. A reference to the subjective perception should be a ‘point of view’ in the

work, from which the image is at least optically „undistorted“ readable. Leaving this point, the image begins

to distort itself increasingly.

 

As Kant wrote: „Mind and sensibility can only (...) determine objects in connection. When we separate

them, we have intuition without concepts, or concepts without intuition (...).”

David Reumüller (Gaal, 1979) lives and works in Graz. Since 1997 he mostly works as an artist, musician and

as a film maker on interdisciplinary projects. His art practice consists of films, music, installations and (wall)

paintings. He has participated in several solo exhibitions, amongst last year’s presentation at the Sharjah

Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates. He is a founder of artists’ collective Crew 8020 and Rockarchiv

Steiermark. www.david.reumueller.com

 

 

 

Kamen Stoyanov

I am going to kill you (2017)

Video Installation, 4’35

 

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Is it possible to kill a threat? Can a policy of violence solve problems of violence? In the beginning of the

video the artist goes backwards and forwards on an abandoned parking lot in Los Angeles. This represents

a movement from the present to the past and then back to the present. The artist: “Five years ago,

I went to this abandoned parking lot at West Olympic Blvd. in Beverly Hills. I found this sheet of paper in

the watch cabin. I thought it was scary, but interesting. I took it, although I did not know what to do with

it. Now I know what to do with it.” The second part of the video takes place in an indoor shooting range in

Downtown Los Angeles. The artist literally tries to shoot, to kill the message on the sheet - “I am going to

kill you”.

 

Kamen Stoyanov (Bulgaria, 1977) lives and works in the EU. He often deals with the questions of identity,

migration, historical definition, social and cultural communication. In his provocative and ironic works, he

uses the urban public places and architectural environment he comes across as exhibition spaces. Stoyanov

makes objects and actions, mixing high and low culture. Themes he is interested in are power, progress

and geopolitics. His recent solo presentations include Restless at das weisse haus Vienna, Will I be

happy at Inda Galeria Budapest, as well as Kunstverein Salzburg, Mumok Vienna. He participated in the

Biennale of Sydney, Aichi Triennale, Manifesta 7, and exhibitions at Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, MAK Center

for Art and Architecture Los Angeles, Center for Contemporary Art Plovdiv, Das weisse haus Vienna, Rotor

Graz, Transmediale Berlin, Sofia Contemporary, and Kunsthaus Bregenz. www.kamenstoyanov.com

 

 

 

Katharina Swoboda

Center of the Earth (2017)

Video (7’)

 

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Where there are borders, there is an inside. Within that space - at least theoretical - a center can be defined.

The center of Europe is far more East than Middle-Europeans would intuitively guess. For example,

earlier measurements placed the geographical center in Ukraine. Nowadays, the official center is close to

Vilnius in Lithuania. Thinking about the center makes clear, how diffuse the separation of Europe from Eurasia is.

According to a survey from 2003, and confirmed by a Google Maps entry in 2016, the center of the Earth

is placed close to the Anatolian city Corium in Turkey. This point is calculated by putting all land mass together

and then calculate the center of the big surface calculated before. In my work, I made my way to

that center of the world: 42 52´ N 34 34´ E, with two navigation devices, which led to two different points.

The video shows the journey to find the coordinates.

 

Katharina Swoboda (Graz, 1984) lives and works between Hamburg, Vienna and Graz. Her work is predominantly

video-based but she also works in photography, installation art and performance art, as well.

Swoboda graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and has been a PhD student at the transdisciplinary

doctorate programme at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg since 2014. Swoboda‘s videos

have been internationally shown in selected venues in Vienna, Houston, Panamá, London, Budapest and

Hamburg. She has received several scholarships, e.g. from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture,

and has participated in the KAMOV City of Rijeka residency in Croatia and the Nida Art Colony in Lithuania.

She is member of the Golden Pixel Cooperative in Vienna. www.katharinaswoboda.net