Csaba Nemes at Kiscelli Museum, Budapest
Remake
Opening tomorrow at the Kiscelli Museum in Budapest is Csaba Nemes’s REMAKE I-X, a series of ten animated sequences dealing with the riots in Hungary last year. The following is an excerpt from Maja and Reuben Fowkes’s ‘Sooner or Later the Tanks Will Appear’:
The work features ten animated sequences that originated in media coverage, video clips and personal experience of the violent disruptions: from the storming of the Hungarian Television Building by masked youths and the commandeering of an antique tank by veterans, to a staged television discussion on the causes of the riots and an unlikely love story between a skinhead and an art historian. Csaba Nemes is interested in the reuse of old scenarios, attempts to appropriate political symbols and languages and the exploitation of popular memories, while his work offers a critique of the crudeness of everyday political manipulation.
REMAKE already has a certain fame in Hungary, due to the scandal surrounding the way the project was first chosen for the Hungarian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennial, but then deselected in controversial circumstances. The artist succeeded nevertheless in realising all ten films, which will be shown together for the first time at the Kiscelli Museum in Budapest. The project is well documented on the REMAKE website, which includes excerpts from the films, the catchy ‘Combino’ song and critical discussion of the work and its reception.
For more information, see the REMAKE website and our earlier post.