The Seeker

The Seeker is doomed to wander, albeit not to some final destination. The Seeker’s attention is dedicated to the journey itself and to the tactics of navigation. On the way, the Seeker gathers information, orientates, deconstructs and rearranges the imprints of the present, filters out the superfluous, the false, the deceptive, what is influenced by certain interests; what is untrue or what seems even more real than reality itself. This figure seeks what looms behind the facts and the reports of the present and what lingers between the lines. Although the Seeker orientates securely in the present, his knowledge and the decision-making mechanisms that help him to orient himself cannot be preserved for the future in any other form than a set of empty rites. What will be gleaned from these defunct movements and rituals? Will the Seekers of the future be able to read their own pasts?

The exhibition of Katarina Šević and Gergely László includes artworks of different genres, made individually or together by the artists – and also in collaboration with other co-creators –, arranged in a diorama, that sheds light on the possibilities of systematizing knowledge, preserving the present and reading the past from the future through small movement sequences, everyday gestures, sounds or subtle approaches.

The starting point for Katarina Šević's video piece entitled Storm in the Archive is Belgrade Radio's news archive, which dates back more than seven decades. The content of the archive, that contains more than five million newspaper articles, were selected and cut out from local newspapers by the archivists and then organized into a complex structure. Although the archive is based on articles published in the press that was influenced by political and ideological factors, and on the subjective selections of the archivists, its main aim was to document reality as accurately and objectively as possible and to preserve it for the future. The video mixes the movements, sounds and materials associated with the process of sorting and archiving with footage that restages the archivists' work. The process of archiving is presented as an activity that physically represents the formation of our thinking and our actions, an action that has become obsolete and redundant, that has lost its function and that can only preserve a fraction of the worldview it was originally associated with as a rite of passage.

In Gergely László’s video entitled Tector Quartet, created in collaboration with violist and composer Viktor Bátki, people with metal detectors wander through a landscape. The seemingly random and aimless paths are connected by the beeping sound of the detectors. In the course of the video, the whole meadow becomes an instrument, and the sounds of the detectors, that are mapping the terrain to find war debris and other invisible remnants of the past, are arranged into a complex musical composition.

The protagonist of Gergely László and Katarina Šević's video work is a character wearing a costume sewn together from pieces of military clothing, wandering around the streets of Budapest, trying to find his way around and build something from the pieces he stumbles upon.

The debris, the small notes, the fragmented imprints and the minuscule remnants of the past amalgamate into a new kind of unity in the exhibition, blurring the boundaries between the fictional and the real, preserving an element of the past that, without concrete facts and events, is still linked to the systematisation of knowledge and the understanding of our reality. These imprints and rites, in turn, preserve their past in the same way that a phantom pain conceals something of what has long been lost.

Contributors: Tilmann Dehnhard, Pablo Ferro Živanović, Antje Tina Lass, Gergely Pohárnok, Gábor Ripli, András Sarkadi, Balázs Simon, Zsolt Sőrés, Kornél Szilágyi
Special thanks: Archive Dokumentacija Radio Beograd, Raphaël Grisey, Balázs Mezős, Dragana Milosavljević, Dávid Pap (FabLab), Gergely Pohárnok, Balázs Simon, Dániel Sipos, Soma Uliczki

Supported by the National Cultural Fund of Hungary and Káli Kövek.