As a painter, Nemes has long used mass culture and images from the media for his artistic reflections. One of his best known works is a story board showing the golden age of film production that he created with his wife, Ágnes Szépfalvi, with whom he has worked since 1996. He has come far since, gaining recognition for his application for the Venice Biennale, creating a project critical of society and collaborating with other artists to create film montages with sound and animation.
In his latest work, Nemes creates and emblematic row of images on monitors in the statue hall of the Kiscelli Museum. By every monitor, there are earphones and a beanbag chair. One sees the amateur video of a hijacked tank in the city centre posted last autumn by online news source Index, but this time animated and accompanied by rock music, making it look like a music video. When one sees Nemes's images, created with film footage by Éva Magyarósi and Adrián Kupcsik, one gains a slightly more illuminated picture of the events of last autumn.
Hungarians have seen footage of the police clashing with demonstrators hundreds of times, but Nemes's animated Barricades with original sound, is more exciting. In Easy Rider, Nemes shows two people riding on Pannon motorcycles over the city waving the Stripes of Arpad - a symbol many of the more radical demonstrators adopted as their own - as Born To Be Wild plays in the background. In Dunno, Nemes shows two people fleeing from the mass of demonstrators to meet each other on an empty side street as the sound of the crowds can be heard in the distance. In Túrórudi - a popular candy bar in Hungary - Nemes creates a rap parody with the help of Juci Németh, Gergely Kovács and Péter Závada.
Nemes shows ten short, very different films in which he uses his painter's eye to fill in the blind spots in the world of images. He has created a reality show of our recent past. None of the films resemble documentaries, rather they stand on their own. These are our private Tom and Jerry stories, about which we still cannot decide if they are dramas or cabaret.
Author: Sisso
