The Life of Places

Fogarasi researches a path of information that extends to culture. His projects encompass architecture, city planning, plastic forms, texts, images and visual signs. Though trained as an architect, Fogarasi works in many areas of cultural research, including the identification of the role of visual elements.

 

Fograrasi's works at the Ernst Museum are conceptual, but show the special understanding of a researcher. A series of almost entirely white pictures in thick wooden frames with only speck-sized dots in the middle say much about his work. Fogarasi is not making pictures, rather he is exposing a process. The tiny points in the centre of the pieces of white paper are logos abstracted from the characters of different buildings. With disconcerting precision, he shows how a few contours of a building are turned into an element of information, then a brand.

 

Kultur und Freizeit is the inverse of these pictures. It consists of a series of large-scale black boxes in which videos made in several local cultural centres around Budapest are shown. The videos concentrate on the buildings themselves, which are searching for an identity after a change in paradigm.

 

"In Hungary, the phenomenon and the proliferation of cultural centres belong to a past political era, in which one of the state's fundamental missions was the democratization of culture. The origins of this endeavour date back not only to André Malraux and French cultural policy of the 1950s, but also to the 19th-century tradition of the workers' club. In this respect, Fogarasi's project has a geographic and political relevance that goes well beyond the Hungarian capital," the exhibition's curator Katalin Timár writes.

 

The examination of space in society is becoming a more and more important subject in contemporary art. Fogarasi follows the lead of projects that have created subjective maps of cities. But in place of analysis, he uses complex images which create associations.

 

Author: Eszter Götz