{"id":1015574,"date":"2024-08-14T11:54:31","date_gmt":"2024-08-14T09:54:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/femuz.hu\/?p=1015574"},"modified":"2025-02-26T17:02:19","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T16:02:19","slug":"peter-forgacs-subtle-observations-2024-fmc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/peter-forgacs-subtle-observations-2024-fmc\/","title":{"rendered":"P\u00e9ter Forg\u00e1cs: Subtle Observations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t
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2024. 09. 29. \u2013 2025. 01. 12.<\/h4>\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
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Location:<\/p>\n

ArtMill<\/p>\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Curator:<\/p>\n

Zsuzsa Iberhalt<\/p>\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Opening:<\/p>\n

28. September 2024<\/p>\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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brochure<\/p>\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Independent filmmaker and media artist P\u00e9ter Forg\u00e1cs (b. 1950) started his studies at the sculpture course of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1971, but he was soon removed because of political reasons. From 1978 until 1993 he worked at the B\u00e9la Bal\u00e1zs Studio, where the experimental filmmaking of G\u00e1bor B\u00f3dy had a profound impact on his artistic practice. Between 1978 and 1986 he was a member of the contemporary music ensemble called Group 180. From 1974 until 1991 he worked at the Institute of Education (later Institute of Cultural Research), researching private photography and film. From 1991 he was a scientific fellow of the Sociological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Science. In 1983, together with Andr\u00e1s B\u00e1n, he founded the Private Photo and Film Research Group, later Foundation and Archive, that aimed to research, preserve and archive amateur photos and footage. Private photos and films capturing private memories, scenes and stories became the primary resources for his art. After his early experimental films (I See that I Look, 1978; Children\u2019s Movie, 1979, Golden Age, 1985) he created Bartos Family in 1988, the first piece of his series Private Hungary now comprising twenty episodes. By reassembling amateur film footage from the 1930s and the 1940s, the episodes of Private Hungary created a new visual language and narrative. Works including archive footage by Forg\u00e1cs were inspired by Horus Archive, the amateur photography collection of S\u00e1ndor Kardos founded in 1970 and the experimental documentary Private History (1978) by G\u00e1bor B\u00f3dy and P\u00e9ter Tim\u00e1r as well. Forg\u00e1cs handles the carefully selected and researched archive material as anthropological artifacts, and by editing, slowing down, freezing and layering the footage on each other he reshapes the stream of images to create new meanings. Through appropriation and intervention, he reflects on the social issues of 20th-century Europe, marked by wars and dictatorships, while confronting us with our collective traumas. Since 1978 he made more than thirty films, including M\u00e1rai Herbal (1991); Wittgenstein Tractatus (1992); Free Fall (1996); Class Lot (1997); The Danube Exodus (1998); The Bishop\u2019s Garden (2002); Own Death (2008) and Poison (2016). From the early 1990s he started to create video installations such as Hungarian Video Kitchen Art (1991); Dream Inventory (1995); Pre Morgue (1996), The Hung Aryan (1997); The Danube Exodus (2002); \u201cCol Tempo\u201d The W Project, Venice Biennale, Hungarian Pavilion (2009), Mrs. P\u00e1pai and Her Sons (2015) and Politzer Saga (2018-20). His works are part of the collections of many renowned art institutions in Hungary and abroad for example the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, the Ludwig Museum \u2013 Museum of Contemporary Art; the Hungarian National Gallery; the Centre national du cin\u00e9ma et de l’image anim\u00e9e in Paris; the video art collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Mus\u00e9e d’Art Moderne; the Haus des Dokumentarfilm in Stuttgart, the Akademie der K\u00fcnste in Berlin and overseas at The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Australian Center for the Moving Image in Melbourne. In 1998 he was awarded the B\u00e9la Bal\u00e1zs Prize and in 2007 the Hungarian Artist of Merit Prize. In 2007 he received the Dutch Erasmus Prize and in 2008 the Best Experimental Film Prize of the Hungarian Film Week.
\nThe exhibition in the gallery of the ArtMill in Szentendre presents new artistic directions and goals while also summarizing the essence of his work. The arrangement of the exhibition and the space is not linear, the artworks are not following a chronological order. In the eight different sections, photos, slides, videos, and installations from various artistic periods form an interwoven fabric. The artist’s kaleidoscopic, subtle observations invite us to deep contemplation. Forg\u00e1cs’s cabinet of curiosities blends visual, sociological, aesthetic, and cultural anthropological research with a childlike curiosity and a spirit of exploration. The exhibition primarily focuses on the works including Forg\u00e1cs\u2019s photos and footage. His videos such as The Danube Flood Ceremony (2023), the Twilight. Pre-Pro-Seca-Tura (1996) or the I Can Also Laugh (1982-2015) create an intimate atmosphere through a specific point of view that he later modifies and manipulates. This approach makes them a tool of both capturing moments and analysis. The prints from slides created between 1974 and 1985 also carry Forg\u00e1cs’ unique, painterly modifications. He reworks the images on raw film by mirroring, duplicating, piercing, burning, dotting, using various colour filters and custom lighting. These slides, like socio-photographs, focus on social phenomena, personal stories, the face, the body and questions of identity. Among his most recent photographic works, the pieces in the modified photo series Kanav\u00e1sz (2023) explore the idea of reproduction, while the series Smoke-Fire (2023) and Puddle (2023) convey the profound and tranquil nature of contemplation. The iridescent images seem like simple observations, but they are altered, distorted and metaphorical. However, through the lens of artistic action, viewers are invited to contemplate elements like the smoke obscuring a face, the rippled surface of a pond, undulating branches, or human silhouettes. These are both objective perceptions and deeply personal experiences, simple phenomena, hidden enigmas, representations, quest for identity, revelations and hiding. P\u00e9ter Forg\u00e1cs invites us to the labyrinth of artistic self-expression to discover all that seemed conventional for the first time through an exciting and abstract filter.<\/p>\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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P\u00e9ter Forg\u00e1cs: Gazing,<\/em> 2024<\/p>\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

<\/div><\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div> \n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div> \n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"2024. 09. 29. \u2013 2025. 01. 12. Location: ArtMill Curator: Zsuzsa Iberhalt Opening: 28. September 2024 brochure Independent filmmaker and media artist P\u00e9ter Forg\u00e1cs (b. 1950) started his studies at...","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1015572,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[667,555,681,992],"class_list":["post-1015574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-exhibitions","tag-artmill","tag-exhibition","tag-ferenczy-museum-center","tag-peter-forgacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1015574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1016300,"href":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015574\/revisions\/1016300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1015572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1015574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1015574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.femuz.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1015574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}