Airlines

During her stay in Budapest last year, Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska, sensitive to social conflicts, was particularly moved by the way the lack of social consensus in Hungary evokes a multitude of unstable and vulnerable visions that keep subduing one another. This makes it ever so difficult to answer the question of what kind of a country one can associate with.

The Airways project, inspired by her experiences, is an experiment to show the Hungarian society, which is fragmented along increasingly diverging fault lines, from a foreign artist’s unusual perspective that is pronouncedly artificial and exploits artistic liberty.

For her Budapest project she organized a flightseeing tour. She invited, on the one hand, the representatives of such groups that aim to constrict social space in a radical way, mainly on a national basis, citing order as a reason, and on the other hand, foreign residents, minorities and representatives of marginalised groups, who are, albeit members of the actual Hungarian society, regularly ousted from it. During her flight, the intermediary zone of the aeroplane – on the frontier of the real and the imaginary Hungary – became the equivalent of social space, where group identity, which in reality forms a strong background, could be suspended, and everything depended on the actual concord among the participants.