With artworks by: Hynek Alt, Lőrinc Borsos , Aleksandr Delev, Miklós Erdély, Márk Fridvalszki, László Győrffy, Insane Temple (Stach Szumski & Nestor Peixoto Aballe), Július Koller (JKS), Tamás Komoróczky, Márió Z. Nemes, Dominika Trapp
Curators: T+U (Márk Fridvalszki, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi, Márió Z. Nemes), Borbála Szalai
The exhibition entitled Geisterknochen and the accompanying fanzine Paleohauntology offer an insight into the creative and theoretical practice of the past ten years of the collective Technologie und das Unheimliche (T+U). Combining archaeology, geology, philosophy and speculative futurisms, the collective invites visitors on an artistic excavation of the haunted unconscious of techno-culture in collaboration with further artists. Referring to Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, which rethinks our contemporary condition based on an ontology of ghosts, paleohantology encourages us to reckon with our biological, geological and cultural heritage. In doing so, our prehuman past and posthuman future explode like a meteorite into our present, like the still unexplained Tunguska event.
The title of the exhibition refers to Hegel’s famous critical suggestion that the spirit can be seen as a bone. From a paleohantological point of view, it can be further interpreted as the idea that human existence can in fact be understood as a phantom-like remnant of a non-human materiality. UFO ergo sum. Not only do we live in a constant cycle of ghostly temptations, but we ourselves are also ghosts. This determines not only the themes of artistic practice, but also our approach to the history of art. The community of ghosts perpetuates itself in the form of ghost evocations. The exhibition can therefore be seen not only as a cursed excavation, but also as a séance, in which phantoms from T+U’s past are amalgamated with the ectoplasm of the Hungarian and global artistic positions.
Márió Z. Nemes