MEANING – Guided tour in English with András Forgách

On Sunday, November 29 from 5.30 pm there will be a guided tour in the MEANING exhibition with András Forgách. The program is in English and there is no admission fee.

The Forgács-Forgách brothers have worked together on several literary and film projects since 1996; the Mrs. Pápai and Her Sons installation – exhibited in MEANING the latest exhibit of Capa Center – is the newest piece of their cooperation. The installation, together with Forgách’s book, encompasses ten years in total, and through the rearrangement of the private archives of the P family, helps us picture as to how everyday life was determined by the authoritative practices of the Kádár era.

„No way not to talk about it.”
This is what András Forgách states in his latest book which constitutes also an integral part of the exhibition MEANING.
But he claims much more than that.
“My mother, the mosaic-woman!” he suddenly bursts out in the last chapter and by this he also formulates the writing technique of the novel: the technique of decomposition and recomposition, repeated decomposition and recomposition, and impetuous dismantling and stubborn rejoining of fragments and shards.
The hidden hero of the novel (“the son”) looks into a time mirror while delineating the portrait of his mother – with the method of revival (“reenactment”) he reconstructs events that happened long ago and confronts them with the dryness and insipidity of the cold and laconic official texts.
In the monumental flow spanning twenty-seven years of the epistolary novel and family saga Zehuze published in 2007, the image of the mother seemed to be intact and unbroken, tragically idyllic in a paradoxical way.
Even the unavertable tragedy that engulfed the heroine in the maelstrom of time seemed so beautiful. The immutable alienation that became heroic by the selfless caring for others seemed to bind and weave together the threads of her story.
This image was broken into pieces again and maybe forever.
In 2014, twenty-nine years after their mother’s death, he and his brother, Péter Forgács were confronted with the unknown events that happened in her life between 1975 and 1985 at secret meetings and on journeys abroad.
It is thinkable because it is unthinkable.
It is unthinkable because it is thinkable.
Mrs. Pápai. That was her code name.

András Forgách: Unclosed Volume Does Not Survive, Jelenkor Publishing House, Budapest, 2015

The book is available at the Capa Center.