
- Dates
- 15 October 2020 – 14 November 2020
- Venue
- Godot Galéria · 1114 Budapest, Bartók Béla út 11–13.
- Press contact
- [email protected]
Short listing
Gaál József
Full exhibition text
József Gaál
Trianon Heraldics
Opening: 2020 October 15 at 19
István Béki’s performance titled “Gúzs”.
With myths it is no longer possible to make that which is incomprehensible interpretable; now the story of the losers can survive only as a delusion. Only the myths of power may reign, only the history of the victors can be universal. Only the Hungarians themselves have watched the history of the Hungarians, and even they have ceased. Even the nation itself feels guilty, disgracing itself, and the loser’s private myth has become a manic inner monologue. In international academic scholarship the marginal footnote does not even mention the already shattered body and soul that relentlessly forge their fate, the forging of community and man. Pain, myth, folk‑tale are locked in, the shattered, cuffed, lonely tormented creature cannot comfort itself. There is no self‑consolatory inner refuge because the victor must conform, must somehow win his pity. Due to the compliance‑driven amnesia, the incomprehensible fragmentation can only become phantom pain, a mental disorder. The remnants of shattered communities will repeatedly hate each other again. After slaughter and torture only the unexplainable and unpleasant feeling remains, worn down by the new bitterness‑sowing humiliations, pain circulates aimlessly. The illusion of faith in internationalism directs, in the formalised self‑critical compulsive illness, you must confess with a self‑generating masochism that your existence has become transcendent. The still‑alive body‑spreading compulsion will rouse—You could have been somewhat more just! A low‑pitched sob, a stifled cry from a crumbling, deformed mouth. The old power federation has produced more spikes, as if its hand could heal the powerless bone, but by not seeing the small body, it sees only far away its own utopia horizon. It does not notice the scourge of tiny nations, the small sighs die in the construction of a new world order. The chain of necessities—says the self‑deemed divine origin of the Miniature Europe Secretary to the Small Mag. For this tiny bone‑filled East Asian attachment, it would lift its painful milk, intoxicate with its dizzying nectar, but this timid fetus of a shell‑withered infant remains unmanageable even without limbs. All of this is nothing but absurd comedy!—a journalistic sarcastic twist embedded in personal myths. A man cut off from his community, left to himself, in the eyes of oversight he is only reactionary and nationalistic. If he takes the relatives’ and descendants’ estrangement as a footstool, he heaves the broken creature into a fibbing blanket woven from lies of political theory. There is no shortage, the time of pain has passed, all has become transcendent, all this is merely Philoktétész’s wound, do not blaspheme with such a disgrace! The true shroud is a series of crushing injustices that no one has asked for a whispered apology for. Cloaked forever in a gilt‑trimmed blanket, like the centaur Nesszosz can enact revenge through the venom in the blood, the Trianon‑cursed, thread‑wrapped, broken nation cannot heal from its wounds. Hercules, the mighty god‑man’s slow and painful death is unworthy of a hero, which at last was deemed a messenger. The Trianon tragedy, like the poison that seeps from the Lernaean Hydra in the epic, contaminates the blood, wounds and re‑wounds spreading the venom of discontent further.