Born of slime and decay – 2022
Exhibition of Stella KOLESZÁR & Eszter METZING
29th November – 23rd December 2022
Venue: ISBN Books + Gallery
The exhibition was opened by poet Imola Julianna Szabó.
Curated by Annamária Szabó
In their first joint exhibition, Stella Koleszár and Eszter Metzing use their art to explore inner processes that have been in motion for more than a year now and have been evolving ever since.They have created an image of an imaginary cave, the damp interior of which reflects several pieces of reality. It echoes the wholeness of being; it plays with the stitches of pain, the dimensions of existence frozen in glass. The cave thus imagined is at once the dream site of the individual, the story of the tales woven by the collective consciousness, a symbolic space of archetypes, and the creation of the exhibiting artists' private mythology.
The key scene of an epic of individuation explodes in the space, where the individual is on their way to discover their own spiritual aspects. As they become one with their own shadow side, banished to the terrain of the unconscious, they open their tear ducts to feed the promise of a final reckoning. The uncanny (unheimlich) tentacle-creatures that cover the cave walls are already heralding the end of the self-proclaimed exclusive Anthropocene world. Organically, it is all rotting into another ’subnatural’ reality, while in the Bataillean base matter, that is, in the slimy energy of darkness and irrationality, the womb of rebirth is swaying.
Text by Annamária Szabó | Translation: Krisztina Heréb
(The title of exhibition is citation from Herbert Wendt’s book, The Sex Life of the Animals.)
The space featured a musical composition written by composer Rozi Mákó and created especially for the exhibition.
During the exhibition, we held several accompanying events, including an interactive guided tour with Ildikó Boldizsár (fairy tale researcher and therapist, writer, critic, ethnographer), as well as a performance lecture at the exhibition's closing event by Márió Nemes Z. (poet, aesthetician) and Imola Julianna Szabó (poet).
The opening speech in Hungarian by poet Imola Julianna Szabó for the Born of slime and decay exhibition.
Born of slime and decay / installation
mixed media / acrylic, textile acrylic, pen, varnish on canvas
108 x 153 cm
2022
This piece is a citation from Herbert Wendt's book The Sex Life of the Animals. As an altarpiece, the text work can create the interior of a shrine. Childhood memories mingle with a personal experience drawn from the present. Two memories of the banks of the Danube are intertwined in a dialogue between a childhood spent on the banks of the wild Danube in the marshes of Mohács and later memories of the Danube in Budapest, which is visually presented as a projection of a fictional vision. In the work, the female characters of three generations appear blurred and flowing into each other, my mother as a little girl, my grandmother as a young mother and me, my present adult self.
In the space evoking the atmosphere of a cave, we also placed 30 glass teardrops, which resonated with Rozi Mákó's echoing musical composition.
