It’s hard to find the beginning, and impossible to fathom the end

Participating artists: Olaf Brzeski, David Jacques, Ursula Mayer, Grace Schwindt
Curated by: Nikolett Erőss

Opening Speech of István Kemény.

„That is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a little more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime its still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. . . . It’s an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.”

Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; Vintage, 1991, p. 93.

So it went. Or could have. The exhibition shows no intention of opting for either of the former statements. Rather, the presented works bring up possible encounters, stories exposed to the narrator’s intention and to the fallibility of memory.

Ursula Mayer’s film „Lunch in Fur” constantly and almost imperceptibly spirals back into itself, telling not a story, but rather intimating a certain atmosphere. Mulling over past and present, circulating thoughts and questions; whether the present is a moment of the past and whether the positions of the observer and the rememberer are separable. The three characters are Picasso’s three muses: singer Josephine Baker, photographer Dora Maar (her portrait Weeping Woman from 1941 is one of Picasso’s most famous paintings) and surreal artist Meret Oppenheim, creator of the furry teacup (Lunch in Fur, 1936) that gave the title of the film, as well as several other surreal objects that appear in the film. Having become historic, and as such unable to find peace, the characters saunter about with timeless dignity in the bourgeois modernist interior. Their monologues overlap, the sentences colliding at the moment an object is touched or a suggestive glance is cast; they roll on and intertwine like the black and white and colour film frames. Images flash up from the past, memories addressed by the objects.

Grace Scwindt attempts to uncover the memories of her grandparents in two interviews. Memories that can neither be told nor withheld. The grandfather tells the story of an encounter that almost came to pass but in fact never happened between him and a Jewish girl before the war. This fiasco inseparably carries both the fear instilled by the Nazi regime and the inhibition caused by clumsy attraction. The thread of memory follows a meticulously drawn yet wobbly outline: as the (drawn) picture takes shape, the story reaches its end. The grandmother’s story is that of the “Chair”. Actually, of another chair placed before the “real” story: the chair saved from the Russians entering Berlin at the end of the war, behind which there is the other chair, hidden behind the closed gates of self-protection. Chairs follow one another on the pages of the book that serves as the spectacle during the interview: leafing through the book is like peeling an onion; each layer holds yet another one. The conversation is almost disturbingly rigid and impersonal, showing no more sensitivity towards the past than was necessary for forgetting.

A child of wartime, the fearsome mythical figure of Jozef Moneta simultaneously bears the promise of liberation from fear and decline into it. His existence “documented” yet not provable. His figure must have been preserved by legends, his appearance always entailing anxiety and anticipation – at least this is how one would infer from Olaf Brzeski’s work. The film shows a vision: hiding from fate and subsequently facing it, which renders the previous flight no more than afflicted musing.

Por Convención Ferrer was a libertarian initiative in the early 20th century Liverpool. David Jacques acquaints us with the schedule of its nine annual meetings via a journey in time that is rooted not in legends, but in the library, in written history. Even if every word of the video is true, we cannot but suspect that some pages of the library catalogue have been mixed up. This forum for self-education was named after the pedagogue Francisco Ferrer, who worked in France and Barcelona in the first decade of the last century. They considered state and ecclesiastical education a device for the reproduction of power systems, and were thus organised, according to the documents shown here, to discuss issues that concerned the widest social strata. The fact that these issues differ very little from those of today probably has little to do with the artist’s arbitrariness in selecting the presented documents.

In the frame of EAST goes East
With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union