The winning entry of the first TÓTalJOY Award.
As the first winner of Endre Tót’s TÓTalJOY Art Prize, Tamás Kaszás’ exhibition – the outcome of his one year research – Savage Intern will be presented at the Hungarian National Gallery (Buda Castle Palace, Building C I.).
On view from 3 March to 11 June 2023.
In July 2021 Endre Tót and KEMKI launched the TÓTalJOY Prize for the first time to provide an opportunity and financial-institutional support for contemporary artists whose artistic practice is research-oriented.
Twenty-seven promising proposals were submitted to the open call. In 2021 preference was given to proposals “that responded to changing cultural contexts and contemporary dilemmas in relation to the archives and spirit of the Artpool Art Research Centre.”
The six-member jury, which consisted of international and local professionals, chose Tamás Kaszás’s project, Lost Wisdom.
“According to the unanimous opinion of the board, Tamás Kaszás’s project Lost Wisdom connects organically to the experimental spirit of Artpool with his background of lived intellectual experiences. The proposal employs collaborative methods to go beyond the classical functions and theories of the archive and to intervene into the archive’s functioning with the dynamic toolkit of contemporary art. …
The winning project and the resulting exhibition in the spring of 2023 will reveal a cross-section of Artpool’s collection that utilises the art documents held here as a repository of knowledge and ideas that are marginal to traditional art historical thinking, but all the more exciting from an artistic point of view.”
In his application, Tamás Kaszás formulated the topics of the planned research as follows:
- (cultural) forms of social or individual resistance against repressive power;
- fictitious or feasible alternative social-, economic- or ecological models;
- artistic practices that are based on special strategies that go beyond of the creation of the work of art and integrate into everyday life while leaving the usual spaces of art behind;
- conceptual works or tactics that heck reality, such as the mail-art technique used against censorship, in which the real recipient was written at the sender and the recipient was an unknown, non-existent person, so in the end the letter ended up with the intended person; etc.
The Savage Intern exhibition is the result of research carried out at the Artpool Art Research Centre during 2022, with the professional assistance of Viktor Kotun, archivist.
It is an installation of shelves containing various archive items from Artpool’s archive (nearly eighty artworks, prints, books, facsimiles and publications presented on a digital screen). The selection of Artpool material is explained by the fictional story of an audio play in which a former archive intern recounts his memories of discovering the archive.