Guided tour by József Mélyi in the exhibition Inverse Cartography of Attila Csörgő (in Hungarian)
On 17 May 2024 (Friday) from 7pm art historian, art critique and curator József Mélyi will hold a guided tour in the solo exhibition entitled Inverse Cartography of Attila Csörgő.
The event will be in Hungarian.
Free entrance, all are welcome.
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Attila Csörgő: Inverse Cartography
On view: 20 April - 9 June 2024
Attila Csörgő creates fragile equilibria, structures that seem contingent and vulnerable, and momentary constellations that can destabilize or even rearrange the perspective from which we observe the world around us, and which can soften our understanding of those (mathematical, geometric and physical) rigid systems on which these structures are themselves based. This approach applies not only to Csörgő's artistic practice, but in this case also to the space of Trafó Gallery.
‘The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.’ To this idea attributed to Heraclitus Csörgő adds that there can be a point of view from which an accidental constellation of things can still appear to be in order. On the photographs on view, strips of tape and amorphous elements scattered seemingly haphazardly throughout the gallery space are assembled into precisely constructed shapes, after the photographs of the space have been subjected to various cartographic projections. Due to the different logic behind these renderings, the gallery space is distorted in different ways, but a basic geometric shape, a square, is a characteristic element on all of them.
The cartographic projections that allow the points on the Earth's surface to be represented in a plane produce very different distortions depending on the chosen viewpoint of the map, on its main purpose and the field where it is in use, or even on the social paradigm or worldview it aligns with. Csörgő's inverse cartography reverses the logic of three cartographic projections and projects them back into space by representing the points on the inner surface of an imaginary sphere (celestial globe) instead of on the surface of the sphere (terrestrial globe), thus shifting the viewpoint from the outer, all-seeing position to the centre of the sphere. The juxtaposition of different perspectives and mapping schemes, created at different historical times and developed for different purposes, creates a multi-viewpoint system in which the heap of random sweepings is reassembled in order again and again.
