Continuing hiatus

Departing from memory fragments of a former cave settlement on Budapest’s Gellért Hill (David Karas) and from an elementary school carnival (Gábor Erlich), Karas and Erlich analyze in their joint exhibition the working of individual and collective memory. Their works call into question whether the two categories could even be treated as separate, by re-thinking what constitutes the personal or the impersonal.

What connects, and what separates us from the ones who inhabited the same city a century before us, or from the ones we ourselves were years or decades ago? How can we connect to the unknown figures who appear on archive images, and what can we do with the occurrent foreignness of our own childhood images?

Those detached and recorded moments of the past that somehow made it to the present appear in the works of Erlich and Karas not as surpassed units of a linear temporality. They are not closed on themselves, but become unbound in space and time.

However, the narratives that come into being around them are also not continuous, not devoid of gaps. These hiatus appear in the unfolding stories not only as spatio-temporal voids, but also as opportunities to bring things into new relations with each other when attempting their bridging.

Their potential to enable new connections is for example examined when a story, which has never been written on its own right, is assembled from the “byproducts” of other, recorded stories; or when a suddenly reemerging image from the past is gradually rewritten.

The exhibition engages with the dynamics of forgetting and remembering as entangled processes, and with the movements occurring between them: where do ruptions lie, and where do the torn (or never cohesive) threads reconnect with each other unexpectedly?