A whale of a bad time

Project Description

A Whale of a Bad Time is a travelling-group exhibition and event-program organized by a curatorial team formed by seven Hungarian artists, curators and theoreticians.

The main theme of the project is our regional (East-Central European) perception of the era between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. The exhibition deals with private and collective memories of Generation Y, which, in the local context, also includes the first generation to be born free after the fall of the Sovietunion.

The project contributors are in and around their thirties, which means that the aforementioned era overlaps with their childhood. The title of our program, A Whale of a Bad Time, also reflects a so-called flashbulb memory.

The death of József Antall, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Hungary, was announced as breaking news on TV during a Duck Tales episode (titled A Whale of a Bad Time) in 1993. This was the ‘free born’ generation’s first encounter with politics.

The art projects presented at our exhibitions deal with various motifs referring to events, cultural phenomena and aesthetics that may act as similar flashbulb memories to the vast majority of the Hungarian Generation Y. We have already dealt with some of these in our previous exhibition in Budapest – Marianne’s Diary.

Furthermore, when social scientist Roger Foster describes the adornoian relation to Proust, he highlights the connections between childhood and utopias: ‘Adorno often writes about childhood experience as a sort of refuge from the alienated, deadening forms of experience that prevail in the world of late modernity. Adorno developed this elevated sense of childhood, as a kind of placeholder for utopian social possibility […]’ (Foster, 2018.) This lies at the core of our program. Just like childhood promises are broken, hopes from the early 1990s for a democratic and sustainable future in a post-socialist country are also vanishing.

Therefore, the representation of the ‘liberated’ 1990s era childhood is an allegory for lost possibilities, but, paradoxically, also for possible futures.

When was the point that the once utopian ‘heydays of the happy Globalization’ crashed through emerging consumerism and an overgrowing obsession with technology?

Can childhood nostalgia, detached from history and ideology, provide a clear vision towards the future?

We aim to refresh a certain collective mentality by sharing memories and experiences, by highlighting hopes and desires, but also by underlining the uncertainty inherited from failed utopias and promises. How does the post-socialist identity resonate with Generation Y? How did free mobility and European values recontextualize the way we see ourselves in the region?

PARTICIPANTS
Curatorial team of artists, a design-theorist and curators:

Sári GINK is a media designer and a doctoral researcher at Moholy-Nagy University of Art & Design, and a photographer at the Hungarian National Library. Her artistic research interest is based on reconstructional methods in multimedia arts with a focus on place and object attachment.

Dorottya KALOCSAI is a fine artist. She participated in the Artist-in-Residence program in Vienna (Museumsquartier, Q21, 2016). She was shortlisted for the Esterházy Art Award in 2019. She took part in group shows and solo exhibitions in Budapest, Vienna, London and Bratislava. Karina MENDRECZKY is a fine artist. She won the Preis der Kunsthalle Wien in 2015. Her works are frequently shown in Vienna and Budapest. Her current solo show in Vienna explored personal memory and femininity in a generational context.

Katalin KORTMANN-JÁRAY is a fine artist and a doctoral student at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. She took part in group shows, Biennials, Triennials, Prizes-Awards in Several European countries. The main topic of her works is the influence of culture on human perception.

Boglárka KÖRÖSI is a PhD student at MOME and a lecturer at METU. The focus of her research is 1945-1989 era Hungarian design and architecture in the context of cultural heritage and national identity. She writes for various art publications and platforms.

Bálint ÁCS is a PhD student at ELTE. The focus of his research is the history and cultural policy background of Hungarian contemporary art museums. His critics, interviews and essays have been published in Hungarian cultural magazines.

Zsófia KÓKAI is a curator and member of the MŰTŐ artist-run space and collective. She currently works at Artpool Art Research Center and is a coordinator and co-curator of the Visegrad Fund project Alterum – Artist-run network in the CEE region.

Ivor ALMÁSY is a Budapest based fine artist, with classical printmaking background. He has an interest in experimental, analog filmmaking. In 2020 he won the Derkovits Scholarship. Through his works he tries to process the effect of personal and family memories to the present. He is a member of the Sekrestye art collective.

István FELSMANN graduated at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Painting Faculty in 2012. Actually he lives and works in Budapest. He has mostly exhibited in Hungary, but he also had exhibitions in several European countries. The Lego Abstract Relief is the most completed series in his art.

Éva SZOMBAT is a photographer working and living in Budapest. She got her masters’ degree in Photography from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME). She released two books on happiness and its effect on people: the limited edition Happiness and Practitioners. She won scholarships in Paris and New York. Her works were displayed in New York, Jerusalem, Lisbon, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, among other places. She is currently working on a series about female sexuality. She is also teaching photography at MOME.

Sári GINK: LETTERFAIR – ISBN 963 18 1254 5, 2020 – 2021
mixed media, 160 x 190 cm
Sponsor: National Széchényi Library

My aim was to create an archive of personal, childhood objects and fragments.

The title ‘Letterfair’ originates from the title of my first school book, which I had when I was 6 and started my primary education back in 1992. This is a collection of words and signs which was created to teach how to write and read. It was published for the fourth time in 1990, one year after the Hungarian political system had changed. The Hungarian Ministry of Culture allowed its use in schools from 1987/88, at the time of the Hungarian People’s Republic.

My inspiration comes from the transition zone which derives from the socialist era and continues its path to capitalism. Children starting school around that time were influenced by social and visual effects and patterns that still lie on the back of their minds. Schemes, pattern tracking, decency and good behaviour are meant to be eternal values.

The visual and written signs printed on catalog cards create a blend of postsoviet traces and capitalist marketized products.

Some of the cards shown in the catalog cabinet lent by the Hungarian National Library, are unique: photographed reproductions of childhood toys, books, booklets, notes etc.; others are discarded catalog cards from the library.