tranzit.org Manifesta 8 lecture
Constitutional Experiments by the way of Manifesta 8
Public lecture by Manifesta 8 curatorial team tranzit.org
March 01, 2011. 18.00
Ludwig Museum–Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest
One of the curatorial teams of Manifesta 8, tranzit.org – represented by Vít Havránek, Dóra Hegyi, Boris Ondreička and Georg Schöllhammer – will share their experiences about the possibility to democratically „constitute” the rules of a group exhibition organized in Murcia, Spain in 2010.
Given the motto of Manifesta 8 ‘in dialogue with Northern Africa’ tranzit.org recalled the Eastern European experience of the transformation of societies after the decline of socialism (and communism) and the different projections which the idea of communism had created for so many movements of liberation and self-determination in postcolonial societies. This became the starting point for their contribution to Manifesta 8 – a point that was not a dialogue, but a conflict of transfers of imaginations. tranzit’s multi-venue exhibition focused on the transfer between theory and practice, in this case the making of an exhibition. On the level of micropolitics the exhibition was an experiment whether the rules of (co)existence among the group of participants can be constituted and newly written from a sketch.
The members of the team will present the process which led to the project Constitution for Temporary Display and also raise certain utopian and anarchistic aspects of writing a constitution beyond the framework of the actual exhibition. To what extent is constituting – as an ethical and pragmatic construction – suitable to replace the given order of an international art biennale? How far was or could the alliance of those concerned by the constitution be successfully realized? During the evening these issues and further communal experiences in connection with constituting will be discussed.
As part of the event the film Rudderless produced for the biennial by the Hungarian Manifesta 8 participants Igor and Ivan Buharov (Kornél Szilágyi and Nándor Hevesi) will be screened. The film was inspired by the poem with the same title written by István Domonkos in 1971. The production of the film was supported by ACAX.
Kornél Szilágyi and Nándor Hevesi have been working together under the pseudonym Igor & Ivan Buharov since 1995. Their films, mainly shot with a Super-8 camera, combine experimental filmmaking methods with aspects of storytelling. The protagonists in their films are usually amateurs and friends whose specific language and dialogue contributes to an atmosphere of timelessness and uncertainty of place. Their new film, inspired by the poem Rudderless (1971) by Hungarian poet István Domonkos (1940), is a modern epic, a self-analysis of a person living in minority status in Yugoslavia in the early 1970s. The poem is a journey through the world, passing through different political and economic situations, both collective and private.
