The exhibition, by Péter Forgács and curated by András Rényi, is called Col Tempo / With Time, after the inscription held in the hand of the subject of Giorgene's famous portrait of an old woman, La Vecchia.
The bulk of the material for the exhibition comes from an archive of photographs and films established by the Austrian anthropologist Josef Wastl between 1939 and 1943. Forgács spent two years researching the archive before creating Col Tempo, specifically for the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
The exhibition, "while it treats, and in part documents, historical material, is not a historical show; rather, it highlights the social-anthropological dimensions of the power of sight that reveal themselves in full complexity in the common context of everyday life," Rényi says in the catalog.
"Col Tempo explores the blindness of sight....The anthropological fact that everyone has a face creates some sort of a universal reciprocity among people: we see others through it and offer our own face to be seen. To this extent, the face is the place for exchanging glances: a common ground. However, for the very same reasons it is a battlefield that is subjected to human hierarchies, the constraints and dynamics of social and power relations."
Forgács commenced his studies at the Hungarian Academy of Art in 1971 but was dismissed from the course in the same year. From 1978 until 1993 he worked at the Béla Balázs Film Studio, Budapest; meanwhile, from 1978 to 1986, he took part in music workshops run by the contemporary music ensemble 'Group 180' (180-as Csoport). Since the early 1990s his video installations have been presented at museums and art galleries throughout Europe and America. Since 1978 Forgács has produced more than thirty video films, the best-known of which is the prize-winning series Private Hungary, which used as its basis footage shot mainly by Hungarian amateur photographers from the 1930s until the 1980s. Forgács first gained international recognition with The Bartos Family in 1988. In 2007 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize by the Amsterdam-based Praemium Erasmianum Foundation.
Author: Éva Kelemen / www.coltempo.hu
Photo: Dániel Kováts
