PICTURE THIS
selected pasts, subverted facts
BUDAPEST GALLERY
1036 Budapest, Lajos utca 158.
23 October – 1 December 2019
Curated by:
NIKOLETT ERŐSS AND FLÓRA GADÓ
Exhibiting artists:
BANI ABIDI | ADÉLA BABANOVÁ | ANCA BENERA AND ARNOLD ESTEFÁN | IEVA EPNERE | MARCELL ESTERHÁZY | KATA GEIBL | MYKOLA RIDNYI | AYKAN SAFOĞLU | TEHNICA SCHWEIZ
When looking at the world around us today, we may begin to have something of an aversion to fiction. The alternative facts and conspiracy theories which have been gaining ever more ground in public discourses may prompt us to distance ourselves from it. The quest to learn the truth and have direct experiences with the real world has acquired ever more importance, and the reconstruction of facts as an alternative judicatory method is part of many artistic practices. Parallel to this, however, a number of artists have twisted this tendency and have considered fiction for its artistic potential: they use fictitious stories, places, objects, and methods of editing to contradict the notion that fiction is necessarily about getting around reality. Building on this approach, this exhibition brings together artworks which use fiction as a tool with which to explore reality, works in which the use of fabrication as the bonding material of imagination is visible, as are new manners of assembling the mosaics of memories and the creation and recreation of objects and pieces of evidence which bear witness. In these works, fiction refers not only to imaginative visions of the future, but also to a means with which to uncover the present and the past. It appears as a strategy which helps shift our perceptions of the past as a closed system and the present as the necessary consequence of this system. It looks at it as a dynamic variable where the use of fiction prompts us to rethink our reality.
The imagination which fills in the gaps in family histories, the methods which freely rewrite scientific methods, and the ideas and narratives which are being excluded from the most prominent political and historical discourses provide the background of these works. Fake documents, fictive evidence, memory collages, and time-travelling objects appear so that their fictionality can become a real experience.
(The title is a reference to Joseph Heller’s book of the same title)
