The exhibition focuses on the transit (trace) lines of the endless dirt roads connecting Szeged and its surrounding, which incessantly assimilate parallel experiences, strategies of escape and coping, narrativity. Astrid Csatlós processes her own experiences, her anxiety-inducing thoughts, by walking the roads where, since 2015, hundreds of people have been forced to refuge at night from the wars and crises that have hit their countries. All she can put in her hand are fragments of refugee life, lost shawls, broken mobile phones, everyday objects that have become unnecessary. But the ‘landscape’ which was one with abandoned items and broken-down cars is constantly changing as she walks, as these items are dumped in the depths of the dumps every week.
The adaptive crumbs of the life of the other, the stranger, the refugee are intersected by the artist’s own traces, interlaced with symbols, in order to re-territorialise and rehabilitate this transitional zone, which obscures identity, through the transformative gesture of finding and salvaging. With his organically pulsating, sacral-ritual effect, she makes the memory traces accessible to individual and collective memory, thus creating an “imagined” community between the obscured presence of the refugees, herself and the future visitor of the exhibition.
/The title is from the film “Europa” by Lars von Trier./
Curator: Annamária Szabó
Graphic Design: Flóra Pertics
Instagram @asztrid_csatlos /// www.astridcsatlos.com
✺ ✺ ✺
Opening: 09. 01. 2024, Tuesday, 6PM
Opening speech: Zsolt Miklósvölgyi
On view: 10. 01. – 02. 02. 2024.
Press:
Újművészet – Szorongásunk irányvonalai
Artkartell – Csatlós Asztrid: Alternative A és Alternative B
Photo: András Hóbor