Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website Pavilion of Hungary at the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia
settembre 21, 2019 - Ludwig Museum

Pavilion of Hungary at the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia


Pavilion of Hungary at the 58th International Art Exhibition La #biennale di Venezia

Tamás Waliczky: Imaginary Cameras

National commissioner: Julia Fabényi
Curator: Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák
Organizer: #ludwigmuseum – Museum of #contemporaryart, Budapest

The mapping of human vision has been a recurring theme in the work of the interna- tionally acclaimed new media artist Tamás Waliczky. The spatial representation of time, futuristic renderings of augmented reality, and the examination of optical distortions have all played central roles in his works.

Our vision, which evolves continuously over the course of our lives and which is deeply rooted in our own culture, defines what we regard as a faithful rendering of our world, and conversely these images affect and seem to confirm our cultural ways of seeing. Over the past two centuries, the invention of various picture-recording devices has shaped our ways of seeing, thereby manipulating our image of the world, in much the same way, indeed, that computers manipulate ways of seeing.

Waliczky’s exhibition Imaginary Cameras reverses this relationship, demonstrating how, when an inventor creates a new device, his or her worldview often predetermines the mechanism of the apparatus and the character of the images the device can create. Waliczky’s 23 precisely constructed fantasy machines (cameras, projectors, viewers) reveal with their analogue mechanisms alternative renderings of reality while at the same time dissolving the opposition between seeing and knowing, computer vision and human vision. The designs and mechanics of the devices make specific references to cameras of earlier periods. The limitations inherent in these mechanisms, including elements of unpredictability (in contrast to the over-controlled, over-developed instant imaging systems of today), have a liberating effect on the artist. With his fictional cameras, Waliczky does not seek to create a seemingly plausible virtual reality, but rather calls attention to the existence of different ways of seeing.

The designs of the cameras, which operate on analogue principles and which were made with digital software, are displayed in 23 lightboxes. In addition to these static render- ings, animations and an interactive digital installation present the ways in which these devices, which could in fact be constructed, would operate. As for the kinds of pictures his fantasy cameras would produce, the artist entrusts this to the beholder’s imagination.

www.ludwigmuseum.hu