MEANING

An exhibition of Marcell Esterházy, Péter Forgács, and Gábor Gerhes

The idea of the immanent intellectual community of the three artists was conceived by Péter Forgács after seeing the solo exhibitions of the other two artists in 2013: the compare (cf.) by Marcell Esterházy and the Neue Ordnung (New Order) by Gábor Gerhes. This hypothetic community constitutes the starting point of the present exhibition titled MEANING.

The three artists do not form a collective; MEANING juxtaposes three solo exhibitions in order to explore the connections between the three artistic practices, to get them read together, and to testify their common ways of thinking.

The exhibitions of Esterházy, Forgács, and Gerhes interact like three books in a box set – not just because text-based works appear in every exhibit and all three artists import or evoke technical and literary texts in some ways, but also due to the manner in which they relate to each other. One needs that kind of enduring attention to interpret the exhibitions either separately or as a whole, opening up the layers of meaning and connecting them, that is needed for text reading as well.

The works of art presented here are new pieces made just for the exhibit. They were completed in the course of the project started in September 2014. The artists did not predetermine any concepts or topic, still – when the three exhibitions were approaching their final forms – it turned out that they all share common topical traits such as the analysis of power exercising techniques and the examination of the relationship between authority and individual. These similar characteristics allow a global lecture of the show parallel to several other possible directions of interpretation. The most recent works of Esterházy, Forgács, and Gerhes focus on phenomena, which are in many cases linguistic in nature, such as language usage of power, propaganda, lies, artistic canons influenced or dictated from above, and the secretly functioning state security agent network. They arbitrarily select topics from different historical eras to reinterpret, thus giving guidance to the meaning-constructing mechanisms of our present.

During the past one year the three artists regularly talked about their ideas, dilemmas, working methods, and creative processes in interviews. The accompanying texts of the exhibition highlight extracts from these conversations. The curatorial method was influenced mainly by the artists’ practices and the first-hand information received from them. (Emese Mucsi)

The curator of the exhibition:
Emese Mucsi

The exhibition is open to the public:
17/11/2015 – 13/03/2016