Máté Bartha – Anima Mundi (Other location: The Gallery at Dobbin Mews, Brooklyn)

Hungary Live - Hungarian Contemporary Art Festival
The Gallery at Dobbin Mews
50-52 Dobbin St, Brooklyn, NY 11222, USA
On view:
Sep 03, 2025, 7:00 PM – Sep 07, 2025, 5:00 PM
Opening hours:
September 4-7, 2025
Thursday 4.00pm-6.00pm
Friday 4.00pm-7.00pm
Saturday-Sunday 11.00am-5.00pm
Curator: Emese MUCSI

In his project, Anima Mundi, Máté Bartha creates a universe of images, attempting to present the hidden anatomy of the metropolis as a metaphysical mirror of human existence. Photography serves as his core instrument to envision a mysterious all-time City and as a device to scan for stealthy connections and clandestine organizing principles. In Anima Mundi, he musters images of real and staged scenery taken in different parts of the world and collages them together into an unidentifiable Metropolis, a virtual location where he sets out to find “the order of things and the regularities of contingency”.*

The city, as the antithesis of the natural environment and the embodiment of human civilization, can carry both positive and negative meanings. As the economic, political and cultural center of the settled community, the metropolis – mysterious in its complexity – can be seen as the highest achievement of civilization. It is no coincidence that cities are so attractive to artists and thinkers, whose fundamental drive is to make sense of the world around us. Anima Mundi attempts something similar, by breaking down and reorganizing urban phenomena into a taxonomy of eight chapters. These chapters divide elements of reality – from microcosmic to macrocosmic – by how they integrate into larger structures, yet they invite a more fluid reading, where boundaries dissolve.

For thinkers, metaphysical inquiry focusing on fundamental questions of the soul, the universe or existence, has always been on the agenda, regardless of time and place. That is why Anima Mundi has many antecedents and coessential projects in philosophy, literature, and visual arts, finding its context in almost every city. In New York, it would be Paul Auster’s anti-detective novel, the City of Glass, that instead of being focused on the solution of the investigation, gravitates around the searching process and the investigator himself. Similarly, Máté Bartha’s Anima Mundi is a case of “investigation for investigation’s sake,” or rather, of “an observation for observation’s sake”. In the project, the fictional observer wanders across the city like Daniel Quinn “who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them.”** 

Being focused on the nature and operation of scrutiny and sense-giving, Anima Mundi is an ever-changing, infinitely-expandable project, and consequently, in every case, is presented in an experimental form. For the version exhibited at The Gallery at the Dobbin Mews in New York City, the visual material is accompanied by an audio piece by the artist’s brother, composer Márk Bartha, who similarly collected and restructured fragments of urban sound. Image and sound unfold in parallel, forming a multi-sensory atlas of the archetypal city.

* Anima Mundi: world spirit. Although the idea is attributed to Plato, it existed in times before him and also in other cultures. It is the vital force that pervades and moves the material world and gives form and function to its parts; a universal organizing principle or the assumption thereof. The concept re-emerged in the Renaissance and from Paracelsus to Hegel, it intrigued all those who researched the order of things and the laws of contingency.

** Paul Auster, New York Trilogy, Faber & Faber, 2008, p. 8.

Emese Mucsi
curator
Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest

https://barthamate.com/
https://www.eriskayconnection.com/anima-mundi/
https://hungarylivefestival.com/en/