Lívia Páldi: Fear Eats the Soul: A Partial Report on Hungarian Contemporary Culture

Szabolcs KissPál’s multi-piece installation From Fake Mountains to Faith (Hungarian Trilogy) (2016)[40] departs from this complex historical event and is based on an ongoing inquiry into the history of political symbolism and the reverberations of the past in recent state representational mythology. The project, which consists of two docufiction videos (Amorous Geography, 2012, and The Rise of the Fallen Feather, 2016) and a fictitious museum setting (The Chasm Records, 2016), looks at the distorted mythologization of the origins of the Hungarian nation and the political formation of the ethnic nation that continues to occupy a significant portion of political speech and imagination. A nexus of images, objects, and documents invites the viewer to trace specific chapters of the history of nationalism through a personalized narrative, which also alludes to the archive as central in artistic investigations of history, memory, testimony, and identity.

KissPál is one of a small group of artists who, similar to Gabriella Csoszó and Csaba Nemes, have revised their artistic practices following their active involvement within the cultural and social protests that took place between 2012 and ’14. (…)

more: MagazynSzum 13.10.2017