The exhibition opening is the preview of Tamás Kaszás’ Visual Aid catalogue as well. The volume that was published by Kisterem in 2013 was deliberatly not made to be an exhibition catalogue, but rather a publication that leads through his artistic practice, summing thematic work groups striking from time to time in different constellations. In other words, deranging the regular order, Kaszás assigns an exhibition to the previously published volume. During the exhibition, the large-scale visual aid installations that are reproduced on the brochure pages come to life in the gallery space like diorama models. Kaszás’ visual aid’s art historical antecedents assets up to the 1920s.
The prefigurations include El Lissitzky’s 1928 pavilion made for the Cologne Pressa, Friedrich Kiesler’s 1925 Parisian Raumstadt, or even the Mnemosyne Atlas’ pageant from Aby Warburg. The tools marked out for illustrative, demonstrational purposes created methodological base to thematically juxtapose the heterogeneous visual materials.
However Kaszás not only makes the prefiguration to be his reference base, but also redefines them in their material nature. The prototype of his visual systems is the communal and public, advertiser and informative oriented bulletin board, which may show next to each other in heterogeneus constellations graphics, drawings, articles, flags, digital monitors, or even text and images collected from an inspirational source like the internet or newspapers.
And although in reality these areas are mostly under strict state control and are monitored by economical power controll, even so it is interesting to imagine, how these surfaces would look through a free society’s communal or individual usage. In such imaginery situations, when not watched and central, but rather personal messages, instructions, stories, messages that are reflecting on the local environment and that are related to communities would appear on them, or just spiritual symbols hidden in decorational forms.