MONUMENT TO TRANSFORMATION

participants: Gintaras Makarevičius /lt/, Ciprian Mureşan /ro/, Jiří Skála /cz/, Václav Bělohradský/cz/

Labor, Budapest, Képíró u. 6. 1053, Hungary; http://hu.tranzit.org
29.4.- 23.5. 2008

The
question we put to ourselves in the autumn of 2006 was a relatively
simple one: What has happened in the twenty years since the fall of the
Iron Curtain to us, to the artistic imagination, to society? How are we
to relate today to the twenty-year period of transformation that we
were, and still are, part of?
In each exhibited fragment we attempt
to map various aspects of changing societies. In the Labour Day
exhibition we focus on changes with regard to work. The exhibition
symbolically overlaps the Labour Day holiday celebrated on May 1st. The
socialist regimes placed an enormous ideological emphasis on this
holiday as work was for them one of the most important motives on which
they rested their power. Over the past twenty years, however, most of
the values from that time connected to work have died out and a new
concept of work in a liberally capitalist society has brought changes
that have strongly affected the lives of people across the social
spectrum. The artists invited to exhibit reflect these changes and try
to capture the lives of individuals who, for instance, buy a turning
lathe from a factory where they worked their entire lives (J.Skála )
create a nostalgic picture of a once lively and now closed canteen
where an artist enabled the meeting of former workers in a somewhat
strange commemorative ritual (G.Makarevicius). In the video by Ciprian
Muresan, a John Cage composition clashes with an empty production hall
void of workers, and becomes merely a conceptual work playing out in
the viewer’s mind.
A booklet has been printed in which renowned
Czech philosopher Václav Bělohradský ponders what remains from the
“work song” in today’s world and what has become of work at present.