Gergely László, until 2004

Rákosi Péter: Left & Right

According to Vilém Flusser, the philosopher of photography, post-historical begins with photography. Péter Rákosi starts his series after history – that is, the system-change, about demonstrations that were still attached to history and even formed it. The dates 15 March, 23 October, 1 May stand for past revolutions, fights for freedom and class struggles that have since become events of commemoration. For the past ten years, the photographer has been documenting with his plain pictures, how the stories connected to these dates lose their original content. How the meaning, character, iconography, social composition and psychology of the once party-state festival (1 May) changed; how the holed flag of October became hollow, and how different, new (?) contents become rooted in the vacuums). Thus, the cog-wheel – earlier the symbol of industrial work – is not the instrument of the “transmission” of the ideas. The people on the pictures become the requisites of the past, mummies surviving their own deaths – the losers of the change. The photographs of Péter Rákosi have transformed history into past factum.  (János Palotai, art critique)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tehnica Schweiz (cv)
Gergely László & Péter Rákosi, since 2004

Commuting artillery, 2004-2006
In the project entitled "Commuting Artillery" portraits were made of three traditional artillery groups in the Tapio region, Hungary, 2004. For three months the portraits were to be seen on the sides of 5 independent, privately owned commuter buses.

The photographed artillery troops, the members of the Bitskey Gáspár Hagyományőrző Tüzéregylet,  Nagykáta Barátainak Köre Hagyományőrő Tüzéregylet, and the Magyarország Felfedezői Szövetség Koroknay Dániel Tüzércsapat keep the memmory of the victorious battle of Tapiobicske (1849 April 4) alive. During this battle the hungarian army defeated the austrian.

In 2006 we rephotographed some members of the reenacting units.

Group-photo of the Roma-row in Lak, 2005-2006
Katalin Soós artist/anthropologist invited us, Peter Rakosi and I to initiate an art-project in Lak (BAZ county, north-east Hungary) at the Roma-row in spring 2004. The Roma community in Lak is living in d-houses (decreased comfort housing) on the edge of the village. This form of living is quite typical for Romas in the eastern part of Hungary. The entire community has been unemployed for the past 20 year and only few had the chance to leave.

On our first visit we decided to invite the local community to participate in the making of a piece. Considering the difficult conditions, we thought to make it as simple as possible: to make a group-photo with everybody on it.

Until summer 2005, we made as many visits as possible in order to gather the locals into the field of the camera, but all steps of our project were accompanied by failure. On our second go, we managed to capture about half the population of the row. (ca. 150 people) For our second shooting we organized concerts and a free-buffet.

The image we took with a large-format camera (9x12 negative), we printed it 250x2000 cm. We mounted it at the beginning of the row, it was stolen in three days. The entire process was documented on video (27 minutes).


Mr X, 2005

Mr X has been the most active visitor of exhibitions of fine art in the last few years. His presence in galleries is by now as common as snacks as and wine. Through this he has become an absolutely anonymous key figure in the Hungarian art scene.

We, Rákosi Péter and I, have been secretly following Mr X to art venues for half a year. We have also done research in the photo-archives of galleries, in search for picture with him on it. Than we contacted him, and asked him to stand portrait for us under studio conditions.

This way we created an exhibition calendar, from 2002 until now, in which by following the root of Mr X, one can get an overview on the recent history of Hungarian art places.

Underneath the images of our research (10x15) the titles, the places and the dates of the venues were stated. They were exhibited in chronological order. Next to this, we exhibited the portrait of Mr X. (80x100 print from 6x7 negative)

The Mr X project was exhibited in September 2005, in Trafo Gallery, Budapest, in a group exhibition entitled Reading in Absence. Mr X was present at the vernissage.

 
Identikit photographs, 2006
 
Identikit pictures are drawn according to witnesses to a crime scene. They are ordered by the inquiring police inspector in order to help the search for the offender. The drawings are done by trained experts (police artists) by hand or with the help of a specialized software. These pictures are usually based on testimonies of several eye-witnesses. They don't intend to depict the split-image of the offender, but to emphasize special characteristics on the delinquents body or/and face.  The idea behind this is to not only find a single delinquent but to enhance the search for any number of people who might match the description, out of which one might be the possible suspect.

We searched the ZSARU, Hungarian police-magazine for all identikit drawings that were published in the past 5 year. Out of those we made a selection. For each drawing we were looking for a model, who would carry characteristics similar to the drawn person. These people we took portraits of with a large format camera (4”x5”)


Kempelen Roundtrip, 2007

In the autumn of 1767, in his capacity as the emperor's commissio­ner, Farkas Kempelen visited 35 villages in the Banat in the course of two months, to prepare a report on 18th-century German-speaking settlements. As a commissioner for settlement, he visited the following villages:

Nagycsanád (1), Nagyszentmiklós (2), Perjámos (3), Németszent­péter (4), Zádorlak (5), Újarad (6), Angyalkút (7), Temeshidegkút (8), Lippa (9), Lugos (10), Karánsebes (11), Mehádia (12), Temeskutas (13), Versec (14), Fehértemplom (15), Susara (16), Pancsova (17), Révaújfalu (18), Nagybecskerek (19), Detta (20), Csák (21), Újpécs (22), Temesvár (23), Temesrékas (24), Hidasliget (25), Temesgyar­mat (26), Szentandrás (27), Merczyfalva (28), Szakálháza (29), Billéd (30), Nagyjécsa (31), Csatád (32), Garabos (33), Zsombolya (34), Óbesenyő (35)

At the time, the journey led through three counties, Krassó-Szörény, Temes and Torontál. To take the same journey, now we had to cross national borders. Following Kempelen's footsteps on the basis of his own notes, we spent a week in the Banat .

 

 

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Katarina Sevic & Gergely László

House Museum
Three years ago, in 2003, thirteen years after the fall of Yugoslavia, Serbian citizens were allowed for the first time the to enter Croatian territory without visas. Finally, people had the possibility again to go to the places along the seaside they longed to visit for so many years, some of them even to visit their summer houses. By now, many of these houses have a ‘new’ owner, or have been destroyed, damaged, or robbed.

The family's summer house was build in 1972, in Zuljana, a small village on the Peninsula of Pelješac. When we found it again in 2003, only the flat roof and the walls were left, and it was obvious that different people had visited it during the war. Some village neighbors said that there were soldiers, homeless and immigrants coming and going…

In the last three years, every summer, we spend a month there, trying to restore the house by ourselves. Just the clearing of the rubbish took more than a week. During the week, in and around the house, we came across different objects, some of which we kept. Each one of them brings back different feelings and memories.
Slowly, they become readable and bear witness to the history of one house. This is why we have decided to try to map the past of the house by cataloguing the found objects and by organizing them into the "House Museum".

We devided the objects in to 3 sections:

1. xxxx - 1971.
The walls of the summer house were erected on the ruins of a very old house. Objects in this category are from the time before the buying of the location and building of the summer house in 1972. Most of these objects were deep in the ground, damaged, and corroded.

2. 1971. -1990.
Djordje Sevic built the summer house using the layout of the ruined edifice in the ground and the scattered old stones lying around. Second section contains the objects that belonged to the Šević family during the summers they spent there from 1972 to 1990.

3. 1990-2002
The last sections is of those objects that arrived to the location with the events of the war. Unfortunately we have thrown away most of them during the clearing, so only a few of them remain and are included in the Museum collection.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dániel Zafír, Gergely László & Miklós Surányi

Krieg der Zahlen / Number War
24.06.2007

We were guestes at 7.Stock, a collaborative artist studio in Dresden for one week.
Throughout this one week, we addressed the inhabitants of Neustadt, a neighbourhood known for its alternative culture and revolting past, to particpate in a game which is primarily played by youth in Hungary, in fields and forests.: Number War.

Rules of the game:
- There are two teams, blue and red. Each team has a flag, blue and red. Each participant is wearing 4-digit numbers on their heads, blue and red.
- Both teams hide their own flags. The goal of each team is to find the flag of the other team, to conquer it and return it to the base.
- If the number on the forehead of any participant is called during the game, he/she falls out of the game.

We arranged to play this game in the streets of Neustad, with the participation of the local communities.. 50-60 people attended the game.

We documented the process of preperation, the territory of the game, its houses, yards, streets, playgrounds, parkinglots, possible spots for hiding the flag and the game itself on photographs. The portrait-series of the participants was made by Miklós Surányi.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gergely Laszlo - cv