Date: 26.10.2022 — 27.11.2022
Beginning: 18:00

exhibition opening: 26. 10. 2022, 18:00
opening hours: 27. 10. – 27. 11. 2022, Wednesday – Sunday, 1 pm – 7 pm

curator: Tomáš Kajánek

The exhibition by the audiovisual artist and graphic designer Dávid Koronczi is a multimedia work, which in a story of three protagonists – a mother, father and adult son – deals with the theme of fatherhood, our relationship to the land, the loss of roots and their re-establishment. This is set upon a backdrop of internal migration, gentrification of suburban satellites of the big city and the surrounding agricultural landscape. 

The film in the video installation narrates the tale of a young man recent bereaved by the death of his father. Though he had not seen his father for many years, he decides to hold a wake for him. This decision is in conflict with the attitude of his mother, who, having endured a traumatic and toxic relationship with the young man’s father, is now at pains to erase him from her own life. The basic building block of the entire installation consists of Euro containers which the author obtained from a logistics firm. Their journey from a corporate haulage centre to a tranquil family garden mirrors the narrative of the story’s main protagonist. “If you can’t even put down your own roots, how the hell are you going to cultivate someone else?” stands upon an object produced from materials left over following the reconstruction of the artist’s house close to his hometown in central Slovakia, where the film was made and where he recently moved together with his family. Koronczi’s work, influenced by his own experience of fatherhood, deals not only with the need to seek out a positive masculine role model, but also evokes a desire for a relationship with the land, which he is attempting to reframe as a fatherland (otčina) while stripping it of the nationalistic pathos we hear in the venerated Vaterland of the Nazis or the patriotism of the Latin word for fatherland – patria. The yearning for a land is not determined by a sense of belonging to a national identity, but rather by the magnetic forces of proximity to one’s native land. When we speak of land, what we mean is soil, rotten apples, fermenting plums, roots of plants and trees, millipedes, earthworms, larvae, communities of microorganisms, the decomposing bodies of our ancestors, ash, extending branches.

The film, which is rich in tactile and auditory sensations, full of kneading and cracking, shows us how our own body and mind consciously situate themselves within an ecology of relationships that transcend the binarity of family–friends, human–nonhuman, animate–inanimate. For Koronczi a symbol of understanding of inter-species relationships is bread, which represents a focal point for him throughout the whole of his oeuvre (we may recall for example the DP.OCH projects within the framework of the Oskár Čepan Award in 2019, or the Ventriloquing series of performance evenings). If we reach an awareness that when digesting food we are also consuming the ideological narratives that circulate around it, bread can then represent a kind of desire for a world in which we form an alliance of species of animals and plants, as well as inanimate nature. Bread is thus a part of the family.

 

Dávid Koronczi (*1990)

Dávid Koronczi gained a Bachelor’s degree at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, and subsequently graduated with a Master’s degree at Ilona Németh’s IN Studio of Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. This year he commenced his PhD studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology, under the mentorship of Katarína Hládeková. He was a co-founder of the multi-genre MEDZIHMLA festival in Lučenec, where he contributed to the dramaturgical programme during the years of 2008–2019. In 2017 he co-initiated the founding of the cultural and society monthly Kapitál, where he is currently active as a member of the editorial board and a graphic designer. Since 2020 he has been a member of the organisational team of the Bratislava BAK Summer School. At present he is working as an assistant to Martin Piaček at the vvv (visual, verbal, public) Studio of Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where among other engagements he has assisted in teaching a course entitled World In Relation in co-operation with the curator, writer and head of the BAK (Basis voor aktuele kunst in Utrecht) Maria Hlavajová and the researcher Kristína Országhová.

In his authorial work he focuses on intersections of the politics of food and artistic practice. In recent years he has realised a series of multidisciplinary presentations on this theme at group and independent exhibitions in Slovakia and abroad: for example an exhibition at the MEDIUM Gallery in Bratislava (Deeper than Within, curator: Miroslava Urbanová, 2017) and at AM 180 in Prague (Humid Intimacy, curator: Zlatka Borůvková, 2018); he has also provided curatorial support for two issues of the Kapitál monthly (Culture of Food 02/2019 and Soil 09/2021 – in co-operation with Tomáš Uhnák); an exhibition and dramatic composition of the public programme in the East Slovak Gallery in Košice as part of the presentation of the finalists of the Oskár Čepan Award 2019 under the title DP.OCH, A Temporary Platform on Bread; the production and publication of the audio story Chicken’s Leg Bistro as part of the DAAVS festival under the heading of the VUNU podcast in Košice; the creation of the performance format of the VENTRILOQUING poetry festivals during a residence at the Schaubmarov Mlyn art gallery in Pezinok in June 2021 in collaboration with David Přílučík and Rasťo Kraviansky, which he subsequently reprised at the HaDivadlo Performing Arts Theatre in Brno during the House of Culture and Fatigue festival in Brno, and at last year’s KIOSK festival at the New Synagogue in Žilina. Among other venues he has exhibited at the Shedhalle exhibition arena in Switzerland at the Kunstpunkt art gallery in Berlin.

 

production managers: Anna Davidová, Nela Klajbanová
installation: Max Máslo
graphic design: Nela Klímová
translation: Martin Makara

Credits

Starring: Peter Oszlík
Screenplay and direction: Dávid Koronczi
Assistant director: Lýdia Ondrušová
Screenplay consultant: Peter Balko
Production assistant: Jaroslav Baláž
Camera and editing: Denis Kozerawski
Sound: Erik Pánči
Music: Erik Pánči a Jaroslav Baláž
Voice: Barbora Benková
Caterer: Viki Jakabová
Administration: Martina Szabóová

The project was financially supported by the grants of the State Cultural Fund, Ministry of Culture of The Czech Republic and Prague City Hall.