Ágnes Eperjesi and Tibor Várnagy worked together as creative partners from 1991 to 1995. Their joint creative identity is indicated by the acronym TAVATE, which is made up of the initials of their names. The name also expresses the symbiotic state in which the “I” dissolves in each other during the emotional and intellectual connection.
For the exhibition TAVATE: Levitation, we have selected pieces from two of the duo’s best-known series (TAVATE’s Bathing Pictures, TAVATE’s Woven Pictures) that have not been seen or rarely seen. The duo first exhibited their work together at the Liget gallery in 1991 during a collective strike by galleries. At the time, the private exhibition was only open to visitors invited one by one from their circle of friends. The documents of this intimate yet perfomatic way of exhibiting can be seen in the acb Gallery exhibition.
Eperjesi and Várnagy worked with the medium of photography in the period before digital imaging, when the raw materials for experimental photography were readily available. The works in the exhibition are enlarged photographs of a solarised black and white negative, which preserve different surface textures and colours thanks to the manipulation of the negative, the physical effects of enlargement (e.g. brush stroke) and photochemical colouring.
In addition to traces of technical experimentation, the performative gesture and abstraction of the most intimate union, the circumstances in which the works were created, are also visible in the images. The exhibited works are time capsules of love and creative freedom, where the freedom of personal life came together with the freedom of possibilities after the regime change, fixing a fleeting, intangible experience of existence on photographic paper.