Little Warsaw: The Battle of Inner Truth
PLANET DISPLAY >>> Trafó Gallery's upcoming exhibition
The newest exhibition of Little Warsaw transforms the space of Trafó Gallery into an imagined battle scape’s layout. The sculptural landmarks designed by the artists organize the almost hundred of statuettes and figurines borrowed from Hungarian public collections into one universal image of a battle. The statues are present in Trafó Gallery by the favour of Hungarian National Gallery, Hungarian National Museum, Military Institute and Museum, Museum of Etnography, Museum Kiscell – Municipal Picture Gallery and the Ottó Herman Museum, Miskolc.
The Battle of Inner Truth exhibition is an outcome of a process of an artistic research, which explored and examined the statuette database of the above mentioned Hungarian public collections. The primary focus of the research was to explore the representation of aggression on statuettes and figurines – on such works, which ’depict’ military acts, patterns of agression in a deep analytical, or in a highly sensual way. The most interesting questions were raised though by the conceptual method which combined and formed series out of these autonomous and semi-historical works of art.
The appearance of an inner landscape in the gallery – an installation of a fictive battle – gives place for the construction of dialogical situations between the autonomous pieces, which excavate secondary meanings out of the works, which start to speak about hidden motifs of a collective unconcious. Little Warsaw is doing a serious exploration - still in a form of a playfull montage – in the archive of Hungarian cultural memory. The artist duo by returning to their praxis based on re-contextualisation of sculpture is researching the artistic symbols of historical identity-construction. The “Battle of Inner Truth” joins the row of such Little Warsaw projects and works, which reflect on the social – even more communal – functions of sculpture, and question the symbolic methods of the plastic genre. The exhibition deals with such primary questions as: what kind of function do these objects have in cultural memory? How do these objects transform the thinking about the narratives of history?
András Gálik and Bálint Havas who work under the name of Little Warsaw since 1996, had their last solo exhibition in Hungary in 2009 in the Museum Kiscell, where they have shown their project “Ship of Fools”, which they created together with Miklós Erhardt for the Manifesta in Rovereto in 2008. In 2009 Little Warsaw exhibited in the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, in 2010 they held their first mid-carrier retrospective show in Münster. Little Warsaw’s artistic career can be highlighted by such projects as the “body of Nefertiti” which debuted on the occasion of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Little Warsaw were also featured in the Berlin and Prague Biennals, and previously been showing in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Lately their works were shown at S.M.A.K. Ghent and at the October Salon 2011 in Belgrade.
Special thanks to the partner institutions:
Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest
Hungarian National Museum, Budapest
Military Institute and Museum, Budapest
Museum of Etnography, Budapest
Museum Kiscell – Municipal Picture Gallery, Budapest
Ottó Herman Museum, Miskolc
and to the private collectors
Supported by:
National Cultural Fund of Hungary
photos © Lenke Szilágyi
