As we look further and further back into the past thanks to science and technology, our future seems to be getting shorter and shorter. The notion of entropy sets the direction of what is happening in the world. For example, heat always flows from a warmer body to a colder one, and time is distorted by gravity but its direction does not change, so that the future cannot be remembered.
Some occupations that have changed only slightly throughout history have largely disappeared from sight, despite the fact that technology has made information perhaps more readily available than ever before. The activity of animal husbandry is one of the defining stages of human civilisation, yet the collective memory retains images of the shepherd taking stock of the cattle at nightfall, lighting a fire and settling down to rest, so obviously experienced by few.
But whose memories are these?
Today, when everything seems to be preservable, documentable, reproducible, can things disappear from the world at all? And if so, where? Do things disappear by being placed in two dimensions instead of three? Or, if not, under what conditions do they remain themselves? Does time deepen and conserve knowledge, or does it eradicate it?
In this exhibition we enter into the alternation of two and three dimensions. Instead of ready-made answers, the visitor is confronted with the task of experiencing and immersing himself in the diorama-like installation. The visitor is both a spectator and a participant in something that inevitably reveals fragments of a story that we seem to already know, but are not sure from where?
“Prometheus stared at the shepherd’s fire, his hands clasped in front of his face. The fire was not alive, just as the man and the bull were made of wax. One by one he ran to the display cases. Ervin Lázár’s short story Fire is evoked in the exhibition, as is Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
.
András Ladányi’s installation is a virtual space – “in which actuality and potentiality necessarily coexist” (László Ropolyi) – and carries the question within itself: What is being lost?