Expanded Realities

The exhibition Contemporary Hungarian Photography 2009 contradicts its own title in many respects.

On the one hand, our selection includes non-Hungarian artists; it appeared a more intriguing endeavour to offer a comprehensive view on contemporary photography by featuring artists from the European scene along with Hungarian photographers.

On the other hand, breaking tradition, we invited intermedia artists who are not specifically photographers, but in whose work photography plays a key role.

All exhibiting artists have one thing in common: it is important for them to immortalize certain transitional states, staged situations, modellings, re-enactments, etc., and still photography is one of the most trivial ways to present these.

However, what we are dealing with here is not photography, although for the superficial spectator the seemingly two-dimensional imaging might be deceptive. Their goal is not the documentation and conservation of reality, but to give form to universal certainties in a way that they shake our belief in reality.

Photography is empirical, its goal being the mapping of reality by means of sense experience, but in the meantime it gives us useless illusions. It is, for instance, capable of making us believe that it serves the memory, while the opposite is the case. With art it is the other way round, as it essentially seeks metaphysical truths, which lie beyond sense experience, and does it by way of intuitions and divinations (inspiration), as well as constant “outsiderness”.

The artist is therefore Homo Ludens and not Zoon Politicon. For art and game are not so distant concepts. However, this game has a stake (and not a self-serving one), which is the understanding of the illusion and the cathartic experience of seeing through it. The ‘expansion’ in the title can have several readings, the most interesting of which may be the way creative artists can show their own universe of reality where a self-exposing illusion forms the structure of things. Of course consensual reality is just as much a part of these works as are the artist’s own versions of reality.

This gentle fusion of reality and unreality is, however, an attempt not to deceive by trickery, but to deflect reason. The present selection offers examples of this, from two different approaches: either reality is presented in the form of illusion, or the illusory is given the force of reality.