Typesetting – Gallery by Night 2013
“The theme: the letter, the written word. Five days, five concepts, 20 artists, a museum, an archive and an art organization. And one exhibition, written as a text day by day. Finding. Scrabble. Identity. Archive. The last one. The exhibition, as a complex work, can be read in its entirety by the fifth day. It mixes a variety of tropes: everyday artifacts, documents and artworks are placed next to each other, in the form of objects, images, or even sounds.”
- Gallery By Night is good00:00:18.000
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- because it is an eventlike and changing story of short time span.00:00:22.000
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- With exhibitions it is like you make it, there is an intensive creative period00:00:27.000
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- and after it, there is stasis. Here this period of stasis is very short.00:00:33.000
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- So actually it is a continuous piece and that is very good in it.00:00:39.000
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- In 2013 it means that for 5 days we work together with the artists00:00:44.000
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- and in essence we make a new exhibition each day.00:00:49.000
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- So the daily changes become substantial and further written out.00:00:53.000
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- I chose 'Typesetting' for the title.00:00:56.880
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- The theme is connected to characters, to the written word, to giving meaning00:00:59.950
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- and to written expression. Being a researcher of ethnography00:01:05.000
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- I saw the opportunity in 'reading' objects from an exciting selection00:01:10.000
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- of The Museum of Ethnography, together with such works of artist00:01:15.000
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- that allow such possibilities of 'reading'.00:01:20.000
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- As it happened the idea became 5 concepts for 5 days that rewrote the story day by day.00:01:25.100
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- Starting from the 'Artifact' since one has to pick the thread up somewhere one's got to find it.00:01:33.220
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- This is exciting with characters anyhow.00:01:39.420
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- I use 2 main texts: one is a definition of the good type setter in a text book from 1941.00:01:42.000
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- In essence that is about work, techne, the knowledge of craft,00:01:49.000
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- while the other is from the book 'Berlin Childhood around 1900' by Walter Benjamin.00:01:55.000
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- A very beautiful subjective story reminiscing about a box of characters, cards with Gothic letters00:02:02.000
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- that could be arranged into words. How this process of learning connects with thinking,00:02:08.000
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- and how in fact one learns thinking only once,00:02:14.000
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- once knowledge is acquired it gets activated but learning happens only once.00:02:18.000
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- So the days get constructed: The find or artifact in which I read the old characters,00:02:25.000
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- the artifacts from the permanent collection of the Museum of Ethnography...00:02:32.200
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- concurrently with works in which it is important that artists find the texts and00:02:40.000
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- use them, arbitrarily reinterpret them, rethink them,00:02:47.000
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- and evidently relate them to another space/context.00:02:53.000
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- There is another piece that is a piece for another day,00:02:58.000
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- the letters from a well-known poster series by Andras Kiraly00:03:02.770
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- that works a little bit with a Scrabble technique, ultimately it is an archive.00:03:09.000
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- - 'Scrabble' and 'Archive' are the next 2 notions of the exhibition -00:03:16.000
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- He concatenates the texts of 100 posters00:03:22.000
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- and actually weaves a really exciting web of ideas from them.00:03:26.000
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- 'Identity' is an important concept since with the specifications of writing,00:03:32.000
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- of penance in different cultures and with different technologies of writing a strong story can be told.00:03:38.000
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- And the final day is the final notion, and also the last letter of the alphabet00:03:45.000
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- that in Hungarian is 'ZS'00:03:51.300
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- for which I chose a very thrilling museum object.00:03:54.000
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- This is a plastic lighter with the flag of the Hungarian Nazi Party and00:03:58.660
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- with runic alphabet -those beautiful symbols- the word 'haZSa' (mother Kountry) is written on it.00:04:04.660
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- -since not even this goes...-00:04:12.000
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- And for this I chose a digital image from Tibor Horvath's text series,00:04:13.200
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- with the title 'an indestructible country'.00:04:17.300
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- So there is an ironic turned inside out version, a slanted mirror that helps one to survive weekdays.00:04:23.800
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- On the other hand it basically speaks about the same,00:04:30.000
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- that misspelling brings another meaning, a new connotation in the story.00:04:36.000
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- And that it is banal, that it simply is totally corny00:04:41.000