2024. 09. 29. – 2025. 01. 12.

Location:

ArtMill

Curator:

Zsuzsa Iberhalt

Opening:

28. September 2024

brochure

Independent filmmaker and media artist Péter Forgács (b. 1950) started his studies at the sculpture course of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1971, but he was soon removed because of political reasons. From 1978 until 1993 he worked at the Béla Balázs Studio, where the experimental filmmaking of Gábor Bódy had a profound impact on his artistic practice. Between 1978 and 1986 he was a member of the contemporary music ensemble called Group 180. From 1974 until 1991 he worked at the Institute of Education (later Institute of Cultural Research), researching private photography and film. From 1991 he was a scientific fellow of the Sociological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Science. In 1983, together with András Bán, he founded the Private Photo and Film Research Group, later Foundation and Archive, that aimed to research, preserve and archive amateur photos and footage. Private photos and films capturing private memories, scenes and stories became the primary resources for his art. After his early experimental films (I See that I Look, 1978; Children’s Movie, 1979, Golden Age, 1985) he created Bartos Family in 1988, the first piece of his series Private Hungary now comprising twenty episodes. By reassembling amateur film footage from the 1930s and the 1940s, the episodes of Private Hungary created a new visual language and narrative. Works including archive footage by Forgács were inspired by Horus Archive, the amateur photography collection of Sándor Kardos founded in 1970 and the experimental documentary Private History (1978) by Gábor Bódy and Péter Timár as well. Forgács handles the carefully selected and researched archive material as anthropological artifacts, and by editing, slowing down, freezing and layering the footage on each other he reshapes the stream of images to create new meanings. Through appropriation and intervention, he reflects on the social issues of 20th-century Europe, marked by wars and dictatorships, while confronting us with our collective traumas. Since 1978 he made more than thirty films, including Márai Herbal (1991); Wittgenstein Tractatus (1992); Free Fall (1996); Class Lot (1997); The Danube Exodus (1998); The Bishop’s Garden (2002); Own Death (2008) and Poison (2016). From the early 1990s he started to create video installations such as Hungarian Video Kitchen Art (1991); Dream Inventory (1995); Pre Morgue (1996), The Hung Aryan (1997); The Danube Exodus (2002); “Col Tempo” The W Project, Venice Biennale, Hungarian Pavilion (2009), Mrs. Pápai and Her Sons (2015) and Politzer Saga (2018-20). His works are part of the collections of many renowned art institutions in Hungary and abroad for example the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art; the Hungarian National Gallery; the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée in Paris; the video art collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Art Moderne; the Haus des Dokumentarfilm in Stuttgart, the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and overseas at The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Australian Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne. In 1998 he was awarded the Béla Balázs Prize and in 2007 the Hungarian Artist of Merit Prize. In 2007 he received the Dutch Erasmus Prize and in 2008 the Best Experimental Film Prize of the Hungarian Film Week.
The exhibition in the gallery of the ArtMill in Szentendre presents new artistic directions and goals while also summarizing the essence of his work. The arrangement of the exhibition and the space is not linear, the artworks are not following a chronological order. In the eight different sections, photos, slides, videos, and installations from various artistic periods form an interwoven fabric. The artist’s kaleidoscopic, subtle observations invite us to deep contemplation. Forgács’s cabinet of curiosities blends visual, sociological, aesthetic, and cultural anthropological research with a childlike curiosity and a spirit of exploration. The exhibition primarily focuses on the works including Forgács’s photos and footage. His videos such as The Danube Flood Ceremony (2023), the Twilight. Pre-Pro-Seca-Tura (1996) or the I Can Also Laugh (1982-2015) create an intimate atmosphere through a specific point of view that he later modifies and manipulates. This approach makes them a tool of both capturing moments and analysis. The prints from slides created between 1974 and 1985 also carry Forgács’ unique, painterly modifications. He reworks the images on raw film by mirroring, duplicating, piercing, burning, dotting, using various colour filters and custom lighting. These slides, like socio-photographs, focus on social phenomena, personal stories, the face, the body and questions of identity. Among his most recent photographic works, the pieces in the modified photo series Kanavász (2023) explore the idea of reproduction, while the series Smoke-Fire (2023) and Puddle (2023) convey the profound and tranquil nature of contemplation. The iridescent images seem like simple observations, but they are altered, distorted and metaphorical. However, through the lens of artistic action, viewers are invited to contemplate elements like the smoke obscuring a face, the rippled surface of a pond, undulating branches, or human silhouettes. These are both objective perceptions and deeply personal experiences, simple phenomena, hidden enigmas, representations, quest for identity, revelations and hiding. Péter Forgács invites us to the labyrinth of artistic self-expression to discover all that seemed conventional for the first time through an exciting and abstract filter.

Péter Forgács: Gazing, 2024