Layered Presence
site-specific installation, K.A.S. Gallery, Budapest, 2019
My concept originated in the idea of “washing out” the space of K.A.S Gallery at Bartók Béla street, instead of filling it with further contents ( however, this is content as well). My goal was to let the space breathe, as it was meditating. The meditator has consciousness, the projections of the phenomenal world appear on its “walls” just as in the human mind, shadows emerge in it, and time behaves differently. The work has several layers.
In the evening hours cars often drive out from the street across the Gallery to Bartók Béla street and and their headlights are strong enough to cast well-defined, moving shadows onto the inner walls through the windows of the Gallery. We captured the shadows with two cameras for each wall and projected them back with two projectors in 3 layered loops. A sensor was set to the exact amount of light coming from the car headlights, so that gave the recordig-projecting system a sign. Technical support: Tamás Bios Herczeg.
In the space there were also a sound atmosphere of mixed noises from outside and interviews of pedestrians walking by the street. You could also listen to a meditation which guided the listener to inner spaces of themselves. Sound designer: Dávid W. Bodnár.
Documentation:
from the opening speach of Márió Z. Nemes: Éva Freund’s exhibition, Layered Presence reveals the findings of a posthuman archeological research and exposes them in K.A.S. Gallery. The installation offered to the posthuman gaze shows the entanglement of creating and meaning of space in the context of city archeology, the relationship of designation and experience of the place (“street corner”) The hidden narrative prepared by Freund does not bear a clear form either, it rather works a “corrupted file” saved from under the ruins of the city, from archive without logos. The squeezed times carry the remains of presence layered one an other that are not reconstructable without gaps. The urban human lifeform is not readable, or rather alongside “the aesthetics of failure” (Kim Cascone) a hypnotic excavation site is created in the systm of relations of noises, breaks and drifts.