Endre Koronczi: Paratusspiritus manuatum

Visiting is free of charge
December 12, 2017 - February 5, 2018.
Every day between 11 am - 7 pm.
Curator: Judit Gellér
Capa Center Project Room

Endre Koronczi: Paratusspiritus manuatum (Soulincubator) – Songs from the Ploubuter Park

The winds are mysterious beings. We cannot see them, cannot touch them, and we can only hear what their movement causes. They bring cold from the north, heat from the south, storms from the west and rains from the east, but sometimes they barely move, leaving sultriness to prevail. So how could we understand, or get to know them?

The artist Endre Koronczi has been working on these strange currents of air we call winds for several years now. As a kind of modern Aeolus, he strives to tame them, guard them, and ultimately let them free by shepherding them between fine layers of membranes. The small sacks come into life, they puff up and slacken as the order of nature dictates. They take up shapes, structures, thus creating species that can be categorized, classified and put into different orders.

The constantly expanding Ploubuter Park is an experimental field, which provides us the opportunity for observation. At first, Koronczi only documented the discovered species only in the site of their original occurrence [Discovered Species], but then he slowly began to experiment with different methods of artificial preparation [Phenomena, Surcles, OpenAir].

The author steps out of the studio and starts setting up its open air installations on carefully chosen areas, varied venues, in nature, where he can only make short observations for a few hours or days. However, due to the specificity of the sites and the evanescence of the soul hatcheries, they can only be experienced first hand by a few – similarly to natural phenomena –, so most people can only see them through the media of photography and videos.

The Paratusspiritus manuatum (Soulincubator) is an artificially created order, the individual species of which may be identified by their geographical coordinates (longitude and latitude), and their number (Fig. 34–89). The multitude of the different variations raises the issue of the method of repetition, while they also discard the very possibility of repetition itself. As the inanimate carriers known by all fill up with life by each breeze, so are the new species born and animated one by one. Spirit-metaphors. Each of them is exceptional. Each of them is unreproducible.

Judit Gellér
curator

Koronczi, Endre. The artist was born in Budapest in 1968. He completed his degree at the Hungarian College of Fine Arts in 1990, and he was a Derkovits fellow between 1992 and 1995. His first solo exhibition took place in 1988; since then, he regularly presents his works in solo and joint exhibitions, and he participates in festivals and biennales with his performances and public art projects. He is the founder of the ikOn.hu (2000), and the m.ikOn periodical published between 2010 and 2014. He has participated in the work of several art colonies and professional organizations. His work has been supported by several grants and acknowledged by reputable awards. His works may be found both in public and private collections. Among various long-term projects, he has been the owner of the Ploubuter Park since 2011.