The memory of arrival is still vivid; you can still smell the scent of a faraway place.
There is more to packing then just packing: it is about travelling and the traveller, it is about the twilight zone between the familiar and the unknown. Recent times have seemingly brought about an increase of possibilities, and a softening of borders. It is easy to hit the road, but arrivals become more and more transitory at the same time.
Packing Case, the exhibition of Katarina Ševic and Tímea Oravecz is a reflection on this permanent state of transitoryness. Symbolic issues inherent in the act of packing make it possible for the artists to represent late modern traveller’s mode of existence through their own personal experiences. Emerging new forms of mobility – our relation to roots, cultural tradition and the unknown – and the experience of our own strangeness and other peoples’ strangeness make this exhibition current. You may forgive me for not dealing with the intimacy of the works on these pages, just to save the joy of personal acquaintance for the viewer.
Tímea Oravecz, as a master of practice, collects and evaluates everyday objects. In her work, baggage remains a baggage to be packed, and selected and picked, condensed and organized for better usability. The INSTANT BAG or survival kits… and the Tetrix are objects fitted into each other, a peculiar system of objects, which aimsto fill a standardized form (as a piece of luggage or a cupboard) the most effective way. These standardized packs stand on their own as complex works of art, and shift the field of interpretation in the direction of industrialized, globalized demand and production, in the direction of contemporary man’s possessive and maniac attitude towards objects. This corresponds to earlier works by the artist, like the installation Contralodesconocido Company (approx.: Company Against Strangeness) probing into the relation of globalized market to unique, local values by establishing a new brand, that contrary to existing world-brands, really connects its consumers.
The survey attached to Instant Bag is by no means optional. The disturbance, the unexplained instant of the work becomes palpable (or established) by the help of this survey, since it guides the beholder onto the dire waters of emigration/immigration, without making the work of art reflect on the issues and questions raised by this shift of attention. The question asked: “ what are the most important objects, that are indispensable in the case of emigration?” does not clarify the notion of emigration or emigrant, consequently the answers can not step out of the circle of stereotypes.
The questions are oversimplified, our choice is limited. Practically, there is one real choice left: you have to decide whether you would take the accessories of elegance with you, next to the “outdoor” survival kit, or not.
This uncertainty keeps the difficult rite of packing from becoming something more than it really is; objects do not leave the centerpoint. This is the weight that looms behind the seemingly light and easily understandable works. “I have been looking for a way to live without objects for years… and I still haven’t found it… “ – says the artist. Under the weight of luggage, the traveller pays too much attention to what he carries with him, and what he might loose, or lost already1.
Of course we could ask, who is the traveller, if traditional emigrants slowly disappear? Instead of emigrants we started to talk about migrants, by which we usually mean gastarbeiters, economic tourists, and refugee-camp dwellers2 – and we fail to notice that they are only a part of those being on the run. They belong to the lower levels of society, to those who feel politically oppressed, culturally marginalized and economically exploited. They set out to travel because they felt the physical and imaginary framework of the their former home unbearable. They do not wander around the world; they are looking for their next home. Irrespective of where they end up, their situation eventually remains unchanged, what’s more, they have to deal with a new form of dispossession and strangeness in their chosen homes.
The real contemporary nomads travel out of an admiration for the world. Unlike migrants, they are not forced to meet strangeness by outside forces, and unlike tourists, they intend to take part in the alien culture they encounter. Tímea Oravecz in her work, Hope chest looks back upon a land-bound, geographically determined existence from a nomadic point of view, while she is revealing her personal autonomy as opposed to her own culture. Due to its traditional importance, a hope chest is capable of representing culture identified with tradition and continuity, and the sense of identity attached to it. By antimaterialising – instead of objects, the hope chest contains photographs of objects either printed or displayed on a monitor – and contrasting alien landscapes with private objects of different sources, it questions the absolute nature of traditional heritage. Here we recognize the artist, for whom the definition of culture as tradition or continuity has lost its validity in the labyrinths of experience. Thus she presents her reality as the “fragile” product of an unfinished and even unfinishable process of creation, a product materialising through a succession of encounters.
This last approach applies to Katarina Ševic’s works as well. As a Serb living in Hungary, she can only cross the border with a visa, while her thinking and lifestyle is not anchored geographically or nationally. Her work exhibited here, Közös Álom Könyv (Common Dream Book) – a collection of dreams about packing – is a three-part installation comprising of a book, a bed and a video-footage.
The bed asks you to stay (and contemplate), while it evokes a certain homeliness independent of geographical location, all the more so because of the pallets, its base is made of, can freely travel around Europe, distinguished from each other only by the initials of the country they were made in. Only our contemporary nomads: artists, businessmen, vagabonds and students travel with this natural ease in a global world, as it was their own. This class of society is based in multilocality, and their geographical promiscuity demands a kind of knowledge that is valid everywhere, and a readily convertible social position. Konrád György said, “I could write anywhere, if there was a table”3
They form a nation without a nationality, because they cannot be put into ethnic categories, nobody can say, they are rootless, but nobody can say, they have grown roots either. They have grown roots at more then one place, or nowhere… They furnish their homes irrespective of its location. Their virtual nation is feeding on their similarities of thinking, viewpoints and common dreams.
Against all their lives’ transitoryness, their sense of orientation requires them to possess a peculiar knowledge, a cognitive web sewn from various cities, that presents them with a map of “the city”, just like Katarina Ševic’s interactive installation Unified Map of Wien-Budapest-Belgrade (2005), displayed at an earlier exhibition.
This nomadic life becomes personal with the collection of dreams and the footage. The video offers a space, where our predominantly land-bound instincts rise up against the utopia of being at home everywhere. Since even nomads come from somewhere. Package in this work of art is something without which we simply cannot get going, something we don’t chose (those things that come without an invitation), a spiritual, mental and historical background, neither positive, nor negative, but certainly given. We cannot get rid of it, but new situations always reorganize its contents. It holds never enough, still too much of a burden to set off with, becoming an obstacle in our way. Finally we still manage to reach the train4 …
Even if the destination stays hidden, the point of departure exists. And the stations are all destinations and departures at the same time. Contents of the package change according to the actual role of the station. In the life of the nomad, culture loses its justification in tradition and becomes the ever developing product of a process of construction, established, and occasionally switched but always used according to different social situations, just like personal identity itself.
There is no home left to return, but its still the traveller, who changes and not the home.
Translated by: Dániel Bart
1 Hannes Böhringer: Csomagolni. In: Magyar Lettre 29, Summer 2003
2 They are called migrants by the mass media as well as by sociological texts, and are usually presented as a soci problem.
3 Konrád György: A művészet és a globális dialógus, Magyar Lettre 39.
4 One of the three versions of the video shows the traveller reaching the train.