Processes III. / Animation

Within the Processes exhibition series we present single-channel videos. After last year’s topic Real Image we chose animations for this year.

Although the genre of animation is used for a varety of purposes, the present exhibition showcases works that reflect a specifically artistic approach. The six artists presented here work with various media: animation is only one of the tools they use as a vehicle for their themes. Individual artistic strategies are reflected in these animations, sometimes resulting in solutions that are unusual in this genre. The spectrum ranges from 3D animations to animated drawings, to eletronic noises, vector movements, to animated photos.

Tamás Waliczky (50), living mainly in Germany since the 1990s, creates animations, installations and CD-ROMs as well as computer works. His animations of virtual spaces are, in fact, simulations of movements and occurrences in the real physical space. The theme of Marionettes is motion, moving bodies, forces affecting the body, which sometimes accumulate, and sometimes neutralise each other. To bring the human body to motion, or to make a marionette move, one has to resist the most general force, gravitation. If Earth’s gravity is stronger, the body collapses. For human beings, the sight of a collapsing body bears a suggestive and dramatic power that takes us far beyond the natural laws of physics.

Yves Netzhammer (40) frequently uses the human body as a motif in his works. The Swiss artist creates video installations, animations and drawings. He studied architecture and visual design; the strong abstraction and the reduction of figures and their environment to simple geometric forms evokes the sterile world of architectural design software. The figures moving among basic forms and primary colours enter into absurd interactions, creating surreal scenes.

An enchanted landscape, in this case the panorama of a town comes to life, becomes animated in Gigi Scaria’s work. The artist from India works with various media. His artistic commentaries on the human condition are philosophical and ironic, but also humorous and subtle at the same time.

In his video presented in the Processes exhibition, Tamás Komoróczky (46, Berlin, Budapest) ventures to present yet another ultimate stage of abstraction and reduction. The artist currently explores the philosophical theme of nothing. A very expressive product of his experiments is the artist’s morphed portrait staring into Nothingness. The accompanying voice, also distorted, cites non-professional poems.

The human types depicted by Eszter Szabó (30, Budapest) are much closer to everyday reality. Her animations are based of traditional painting techniques, such as watercolour. The adaptation of the highly sensitive, precise paintings into the world of digital technology creates a tension, which Szabó makes emphatic: the manual, indistinct, lyrical line-and colouring system is confronted with digitalized, perfectly repeated gestures. Humour and irony are also present in these works..

Rosa Menkman (NL) is an artist and VJ, whose work focuses on technology. Her works are based on the accidental or artificial errors and malfunctions of digital technology. Cutting these glitches from their original environment, she creates independent signs and works. She calls this method ‘machine poetry’ or ‘digital error art’.

Andrea Berg