Gábor Ősz: Spomen

Vintage Gallery, Budapest
16 January – 9 February 2018

They were designed by different sculptors conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic. These monuments attracted millions of visitors per year, especially young pioneers for their “patriotic education”. After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.

They always stand in the landscapes of wild nature outside of cities and urban life. This gives an extra impact to these structures. But what makes them extraordinary is that they are always abstract in forms as if the makers wanted to pour feelings into concrete. As if they had freed themselves from literary figurative forms to lure away narratives from the subject, showing off heroism, power and the meaning of winners of independence. During WWII Yugoslavia had the biggest partisan movements throughout Europe and it was almost the only nation to free itself from the Nazi occupation, alone without any outside help. Therefore after the war Yugoslavia had special position not only in the region, but also in the whole of Europa. They seemed to have the possibility to choose the political system of communism free from the Soviets.

Looking at these objects one can feel how abstract forms can express meanings and feelings in a certain manner. They often use geometrical and organic forms that aroused my interest. But not in a documentary manner to photograph them, but to find a way to capture the feelings, which awaken by these pure, abstract forms. Therefore I choose the technic of camera obscura and to build an object that strongly following the form of the geometrical elements that appear in the structures.

Monuments that often employ geometric shapes reawakened in me an old idea – a theory of the relationship between image and geometric forms. I selected a few Spomeniks that I was interested in focusing on more closely. My choice fell on monuments that utilized cubes, cylinders, and triangle-based pyramids (tetrahedrons).

Aside from approaching geometric bodies from a standpoint of scientific methodology, many examples can be found for their metaphoric or architectural use, since, through the course of history, these bodies were assigned mystical, esoteric, religious and symbolic value. They were believed to hold special powers and used in many fields of art, just as – in the current case – they were called upon to express partisan powers.

I have built cameras in the shape of which resembles the form of the selected geometrically monuments and whose size allows for the 8×10 inch cut sheet film that I wish to work with to properly fit inside the three-dimensional geometric forms. The resulting cameras operate according to the camera obscura method, but capture images simultaneously in 360 degrees on the entire inner wall of the forms that make up the given geometric body. The resulting image assumes its final format when it is spread out on a two-dimensional plane showing a certain pattern. The complex system of images in this difficult-to-access format further abstracts an already abstract object, but seems would special ricocheted get in the interpretation.

The thus created images appear not as an interpretation but as a deconstruction of the geometric body and the metaphoric significance to recompose the symbolic meanings. The question is how the relationships of various aspects change their trajectory by this bizarre reflection and whether deconstruction can be a projection of newly found reconstruction.

The newborn abstract elements hopefully would carry the recomposed concept of complex meanings.

Gábor Ősz