Proposal for the Hungarian Pavilion at 52 nd Venice Biennial

Artist: Csaba Nemes
Project title: Remake
Curators: Maja and Reuben Fowkes

The presentation of Csaba Nemes for the Hungarian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennial is conceived as a series of animation films entitled Remake, which takes as their subject the dramatic public events in Budapest that gripped the world in autumn 2006. These ten short films focus on intensive media coverage of the disturbances, individual experiences through personal narratives and the emancipatory power of nascent urban myths. On a more general level, Remake as a contemporary art project creates a space to investigate the modalities of disorder, and the possibilities and problems inherent in it.

The notion of Remake in the title of Nemes’s work refers to the re-enactments that have occurred during the public events around the 50 th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, and on the other hand, to the disturbances in general, which have been interpreted as an unsuccessful attempt to repeat the 1956 itself. Reenactment in cultural theory traces reoccurances of human behaviour in similar circumstances that have relevance in both the historical and artistic fields. In the historical sense of reenactment, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 may be recognised as a vital precursor of later popular struggles against Soviet domination. In the context of contemporary art, re-enactment has become a favourable form for revisiting the ephemeral art works of previous periods, as well as visualising past events of historical or cultural importance. As popular wisdom has it, ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’

The proposed project combines Csaba Nemes’s passion for drawing with his fascination with story telling, changing environments and the ambience of contemporary society. As a truly multi-media artist, he has worked with film, paintings, drawings, installations and conceptual actions, often simultaneously using more than one medium as a conduit for his ideas. The choice of animation as a vehicle in this project, based on hand drawing and computer post-production, provides both the immediacy of artistic creation and a useful distance from the plain illusionism of documentary realism. Nemes’s recent work, such ABC - ACB, has dealt with the changes of the last decade in Hungarian society, in the case through the issue of the disappearance of ABCs, common food stores, and their replacement by the supermarket chain ACB, which plays through its branding on nostalgia for the products of the old times. In his newest project, there is also continuity with his earlier practice of Storyboards that subtly probe intense moments of social and emotional life.

This proposal for the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 2007 would involve an exhibition with synchronised projections, a profound sound system, and an exhibition layout that engages viewers in the overall narrative sequence of Remake. The accompanying bi-lingual English Hungarian catalogue would include essays by experts who would throw light on the project from various aspects, such as the context of re-enactment in art and society, the consideration of drawing in post-medial reality, and the problems of narration in contemporary art. Art historians and theorists would be selected from both Hungary and abroad, while the publication is envisaged as a lasting contribution to the wider issues raised by the work. A website would include documentation of the project, interviews with the artist and curators, as well as other responses and reflective material. It would take the form of a blog, as a reference to the importance of blogging as a news source and the latest communication tool during times of social disruption.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are independent curators and art historians whose field of interest lies within the areas of memory, ecology and translocal exchange between Croatia, Hungary and the UK. Their current exhibition Revolution is not a Garden Party deals with the resonances of revolution in contemporary art and was organised as a tribute to the revolutionary spirit of 1956. After Trafó Gallery Budapest, it tours to Holden Gallery Manchester, Norwich Gallery and Galerija Miroslav Kraljević in Zagreb, and is accompanied by a major publication. Reuben Fowkes co-organised the conference on 1956: The Legacy of Political Change for Art and Visual Culture at Oxford Brookes University (2004), co-edited a special issue of Third Text on Europe in the Fifties and is the initiator of the SocialEast Forum on the Art and Visual Culture of Eastern Europe at Manchester Metropolitan University. Together Maja and Reuben Fowkes have written extensively on contemporary Hungarian art and consistently curated exhibitions, film screenings and presentations by leading Hungarian artists for an international audience.