The Other Planet
A lecture at the Open School at WIELS, 2024
I'm so glad you came. I'm going to talk about the project I'm currently working on here at WIELS called The Other Planet, which I started earlier, and now I am developing the project further. This is a video animation that includes archive footage, my own recordings, and animated parts. Before that, however, I will touch on two other groups of works and topics that are important antecedents of the current work.
Through my body
I grew up in an interesting household of an intellectual family in the communist Hungary in a self-sufficient homestead in my grandfather’s garden due to the lack of work and money. My family was an enemy of the state, therefore excluded from the society and my father and grandfather were under constant close surveillance by the secret police.
And it was fantastic, at least for us, kids. My family, all creative people, built up their own, isolated private universe for us. It was like living in a fairytale, in total freedom in the forest, and my grandfather was a genuine feminist, although he didn't know it himself. Of course, not quite with his wife, but with his daughter and granddaughter, me.
I think it’s easy to understand that this situation when you live in a close supportive bubble, and that the outside world is said to be illegitimate that instills you the freedom and independence that you don’t feel the pressure to fulfill the expectations of the others and the outside world. Of course, beyond the basic expectations of my little bubble that you should not endanger other people's food and shelter with your irresponsible behavior, as well as not hurt other people's feelings and dignity. (You don't have to raise your child in exile to have these thoughts. It's just an option.) This early instillation was a huge effect on me, for better or worse. I was shocked as a teenage girl to realize that the outside world works differently even in the most intimate situations. So, it was quite natural for a young girl, like me, that I begin the mapping of how I want to live in that world, through my skin and body, my sensuality, and my desires. Somehow intuitively, I was convinced that this map through sexuality would draw my world beyond sexuality, in other areas of my life, my work, my roles, and positions. As for the desire for power and freedom, these different domains like love, sex, work, positions, succes are inseparable. That's how I started making the works with the visual elements of sexuality and what they may be called pornography according to social convention. Many years later when I came across the work of Bataille or de Sade I realized that they also used the imagery of sexuality to express their view of their world beyond sexuality. At that time, I didn’t know much about them, and I had no idea what was happening in other parts of the contemporary art world and contemporary theory, I could only rely on Plato in the family library. Two of my early works took their titles from him, the Feast (Symposium) and the Aphrodite Urania, but they really had little to do with Plato. (Seeing the complete incomprehension of my surroundings, in an article in 1992 I tried to connect my works with literature known to others.) At the beginning I created these works under the pseudonym Caliban, from a character in Shakespeare's The Tempest, who in Prospero's world is a being of an indeterminate species who avoids any classification of that system. Then I built complex space constructions in different locations, the Slanting Space. I built a new, slanted floor in the gallery – and once also the tilted walls -, that contradicted the familiar system of vertical-horizontal coordinates determined by gravitation thus forcing the viewers entering the space to walk on an inclined floor. At the same time, I hung the exhibited objects, the carved cutting boards from the ceiling which placed the viewers in the original, familiar space determined by gravitation. These constructions referred to the experience how our own desires, as well as our expectations of others’ desires, are determined or paralyzed by the system.
A late series related to the previous ones is the Video Stills. I shot reenactment videos of myself naked in a state of desire or ecstasy without any reference to the object of desire. I printed some frames from the video and I sewed embroidered silk appliques depicting my family members from old photographs. The pink silk and the embroidery itself are a very personal material and activity from my childhood. When I was a child, we sewed a lot, and my grandmother used similar pink silk for underwear. I drilled hundreds of holes in the dibond, and stitched the photos together with the silk appliques depicting the characters of my life. As an actor I must have done good job, because the audience interpreted my movements and my facial expressions in very different ways, from pleasure to religious ecstasy to physical suffering and childbirth.
Imagining the past
The other topic that is closely related to The Other Planet is how I came into close contact with photography as a means of creating our past and projecting our desires.
My grandparents were enthusiastic amateur photographers, working with glass negatives. I inherited their collection of 2500 pieces. They always invented the set and the image together, my grandmother was the director, and my grandfather was the cameraman, and I was standing next to him in the darkroom since I was 4. From my early childhood this collection of negatives represented for me the inarticulated past, the documentation of unquestionnable truth before interpretation or narrative reorganization - which, of course, was a false view because the act of taking a photograph is interpretation in itself. When I looked at these photos as an adult, I really saw how true this was. The shape of the people, their mass, their movements, the interactions between them form a very complex system of what happened, what did not happen, what is in the picture, what is not in the picture, what was lost and what was desired. Not a single picture shows the tragedy of their lives directly.
To me, the manipulation of these negatives meant changing the past, too. An illusion that I rewrite the history but not only in the phase of interpretation but also in the realm of the inarticulate mass of events. I manipulated photos and negatives in various ways. For example, in the photo drawing series, I enlarged only a small part of the negative, or the negative in a small size on a matte photo paper, and then I continued the image with pencil and ink. Or I make lightboxes with the old negatives. I make a digital copies of them in their original size, 6x9cm. Then I take colour shots of myself and insert my figures from the colour negatives into the scene of the original black and withe negatives. As a result, I show up on each of these negatives twice, in two different ages. I built an installation for each of these film negatives by placing a mirror behind them. This provides sufficient light for making the scene visible. I also work a lot with silk appliques on the photos as I explaned earlier that is also an intervetion in the past. I also tried to catch time and movement in a frozen image by creating collages, for example, in the Time Tunnel series. For this I used archival films or shot videos myself. I cut the contours of the moving figures out from the base photo and with these layers I recreate the movements and their presence of the characters when they have long since disappeared from that place and from my life. These works are a documentation of the painful efforts of memory and postmemory work leading to rewriting our past in order to change our present and a future.
It was only recently that I thought about how it is so obvious for me that I use my grandfather's photos, however I didn't take them. In addition to the fact that my grandfather gave the permission, somehow, I felt that these negatives exist so because he showed them to me, and I looked at them. Just as, according to Heisenberg’s quantum physics, the universe takes on its existence, it becomes so when the human gaze is fixed on it, which is the result of our 3.8-billion-year-old living world.
The Other Planet - Imagining the present
The idea of The Other Planet has been forming for a long time. It was obvious to me from the stories of my childhood that even the most personal love story cannot be understood without the political context of the time. During Covid, I had the opportunity to watch hundreds of hours of archival films and photos of events that fundamentally defined the history of the 20th and the 21st century, this has been my great passion for years. I am particularly interested in the visual display of scenes that show recurring motifs, basic human behaviors, reactions, and relations between people throughout history. Those that can be understood and deciphered even without a precise knowledge of the events, like war, captivity, submission, power, escape, vulnerability, violence, manipulation, demagoguery, exploitation, hope, love, joy, empathy etc.
The Other Planet is a fantasy play how our descendants will remember us, in 300 years in a world from where the Earth’s history can be observed not solely from the point of view of humans but also of all living creatures, animals, plants, and even of rocks and of the entire eco-system. Will they inherit our traumas, the consequences of all we did, still carrying them when the concrete faces and figures have long faded away and turned into silhouettes? Or will only the codes go down to them?
In the first series of works I combine digital photo montages of archive and contemporary news footage and press photos with charcoal drawings. In the drawings, the animals participate in, suffer, or observe the events documented in the montages.
The second group of works is based on photos I took at the North Sea, where in late September at sunset the world of another planet with its alien atmospheric conditions emerges from the lights, mystical and bit kitchy. Each photo shows a major event in the 20th and 21st centuries in the form of embroidered black silk appliques. In both series, the emotional charge of the scenes and the recognizable codes of behavior were the primary aspects and not the specific historical event.
For example, I couldn't escape from the sequence in one of the World War 2 documentaries, when a captured German soldier marching with his hands raised and cheerfully smiles at the photographer. An ordinary man, perhaps who felt that it was still better to be captured than to continue fighting in a war he had nothing to do with.
Or the bucolic moments of the fearsome and powerful Yazidi guerrilla women fighting against Isis, and who have built a utopian community of women in the mountains and whose lives defy all gender stereotypes pros and cons.
When the Honduran woman fleeing with her children across the Mexico-US border enters the landscape of the other planet of my photo, another story unfolds. There is a field of theoretical physics called the anthropic principle. This claims with theoretical modeling that if the four basic physical principles – the strong force, the weak force, gravitation and electromagnetic force - were only a little different, then the world would not be a little different, but would not exist at all. The 15-billion-year-old universe created by sheer chance and precise physical laws, this is an open-ended and unpredictable story. The human-made laws of human societies, the beliefs, religions, borders and boundaries, contracts about who can go where, who can live where and how become weak against the power of the laws of the 4.5-billion-year-old solar system, 3.8-billion-year-old organic life, and a few million years of human evolution (and those human-made rules can be changed.)
I have always been interested in the phenomenon that the beliefs, stories, and religions to which people associate their identity far outlive the real political and economic situations in which they were created, and these work like a magic wand in the hands of politicians.
The stitched photo, the Flag that is based on a photograph taken on Russian separatists in Dobalcev, Ukrain in 2015, was made earlier than the Ukrainian war broke out. I was inspired by witnessing the survival of the nostalgic belief that 1200 years ago the Kievan Rus was the cradle of Russia and Belarus. Which is true, by the way.
I call the current part of The Other Planet project The Promised Land. I show you some footage.
I am working on new video animations and photo-based works in which I compile my own recordings and archival footages and sound, for example about the Manhattan project, where the theoretical physicist developed the first nuclear bomb, and other archival recordings of nuclear test explosions, which in the 1950s were considered social events, and the proud invited guests watched the explosion from armchairs wearing no protection except sunglasses.
I am always interested in the history of science, mathematics, physics, and how they relate to politics and to the people's beliefs. The development of physics was given a huge boost by the Second World War, by the race to create the first nuclear bomb. Our technical environment, our healthcare and the tools of our human relationships in the present are based on the achievement of the theoretical physics from the beginning of the last century. Of course, the same development led to the destruction of two cities.
The Promised Land is a 21st century approach to a very basic human motive, a very old tale, the hope that if a situation cannot be resolved, here and now, then the people place it in a desired location in the distant future. This connects the ancient story of the Promised Land in the Book of Moses with the 21st century popular and even scientific beliefs that humanity will flee from the inevitable ecological catastrophe of the Earth to a colony established on the Moon or Mars, and with Elon Musk and his self-proclaimed prophetic role. Although it might be easier to find a solution at a fraction of the cost of such a plan by changing the global economic and political system. But probably these unrealistic goals will have the greatest importance in the future.
My plan for the Promised Land series was created long before the Israeli war broke out. Among other things, I was inspired by how the three dominant beliefs of the region, a 2600-year-old story, a 2000-year-old story, and a 1400-year-old story have worked until today. As they, together with political manipulations and interests, have actively fueled the violence and shaped the politics of the region. Will it ever be possible to leave these ancient codes behind us?
Finally, I can say that what interests me in these images I was talking about in my lecture is the undecided, in-between, desperate, hesitating movements of vulnerable people trying to navigate in these power structures, where good decisions can never be made.
Thank you for your attention.
