MARCELL ESTERHÁZY · Marcell Esterházy // // +33 6 79 39 25 93 // [email protected] 2009 Left to Right, The Katzen Art Center, Washington, USA 2009 The Rain before it

Marcell Esterházy // www.esterhazymarcell.net // +33 6 79 39 25 93 // [email protected]

marcell esterházy


Marcell esterházy

1977, Budapest, Hungarylives and works in Paris, [email protected]

EDUCATION2004 Le Collège Invisible, post-diplôme ESBAM, Marseille 2003 Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest

AWARDS, GRANTS2010 Nomination for AVIVA Art Award 20102009 Derkovits Scholarship 2009 Stúdió Prize 2004 Lucien Hervé et Rudolf Hervé Award - mention spéciale du Jury, Paris 2004 Eötvös Scholarship

RESIDENCIES2010 Residency NRW, Düsseldorf 2007 Residency, Ateliers d’artistes de la Ville de Marseille, Marseille 2000 SUBOTNIK (Ukiyo Camera Systems - Akademie Schloss Solitude), Stuttgart

PUBLIC COLLECTIONSLudwig Museum Budapest, Museum of Contemporary Art, HungaryFonds Communal d’Art Contemporain (FCAC), Marseille, France

SELECTED SOLO ExHIBITIONS 2010 Les enfants terribles, Atelier am Eck, Düsseldorf, Germany2009 Studio Prize, Labor, Budapest2008 v.n.p., Gallery Aline Vidal, Paris 2008 atelier_bp Part I., Lumen Gallery, Budapest2004 Lucien Hervé et Rudolf Hervé Award, ESA, Paris 2004 h.l.m., Sycomore Art, Paris, France 2003 Stop The Pigeon!, Trafó Gallery, Budapest, Hungary 2000 Attendometer2, Goethe Institut - <eckermann>, Budapest2000 No Title, Vizivàrosi Gallery, Budapest, Hungary

SELECTED GROUP ExHIBITIONS2010 Paris Photo 2010, Fondation Lumen, Carrousel du Louvre, Paris2010 Aviva Art Award 2010, Mûcsarnok-Kunsthalle, Budapest2010 Private Landscapes, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf2010 Viszonyok, Székesfehérvár Városi Képtár- Deák Gyûjtemény, Székesfehérvár, Hungary 2010 Grant of Derkovits, Ernst Museum, Budapest2009 Videospritz #4 - international video art, Trieste Contemporanea2009 How to change your life in a day, Galerie Aline Vidal, Paris2009 Little Hungarian Pornography, Modem, Debrecen, Hungary2009 Temporary Videospace, Videospace, Pécs, Hungary2009 New Acquisitions – Rarely Seen Works, Ludwig Museum, Budapest2009 Screening Room, Janos Gat Gallery, New York, USA


2009 Left to Right, The Katzen Art Center, Washington, USA2009 The Rain before it Falls, kArton Gallery, Budapest2008 Regards Projetés, Apollonia, Strasbourg, France2008 Family Affairs, Kunstverein Ulm, Germany2007 Diva Digital & Video Art Fair, Le Louvre des Antiquaires, Paris 2007 Agorafolly Inside, La Centrale électrique, Bruxelles2007 Preview Berlin – The Emerging Art Fair, Impex, Berlin, Germany2007 L’arte di invecchiare, ar/ge kunst, Bolzano, Italy2007 PragueBiennale3, Karin Hall, Prague2007 «Je vous croyais perdus à tout jamais!», Ateliers d’artistes, Marseille2006 The Other City, Trafó Gallery, Budapest, Hungary2006 Lost and Found, Staatliches Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany2006 Interrupted connections, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw2006 La Grande Experience-La Nuit Blanche, Toronto, Canada 2006 Jeune Creation, La Bellevilloise, Paris2006 Portes Ouvertes, Ateliers d’artistes de la Ville de Marseille, France2006 High-Angled Lowlands (Current Art from Hungary), NBK Berlin2006 Private Matter?, Mücsarnok-Halles d’art contemporain, Budapest2005 LOOP 05 - Video Art Festival, Barcelona, Spain 2005 Field-works, Irokéz Collection, Szombathely, Hungary 2005 CIS4 - Le Collège Invisible, Galerie rue Montgrand, Marseille, France 2005 Are you ready? - L’art vidéo actuel en Hongrie, NBK, Berlin 2004 Buy-Sellf , Ateliers d’Artistes de la Ville de Marseille, Marseille, France 2004 Budapest Errances, Le Carrosse, Paris, France 2003 PragueBiennale1, National Gallery, Prague2002 Display, Galerie LOOP House, Lecce, Italy 2002 Superfluous Gesture, Collegium Hungaricum, Berlin, Germany2001 Service, Mücsarnok-Halles d’art contemporain, Budapest, Hungary2001 Malice & Danube, Galerie de l’ESBAM, Marseille, France 2001 Solitude au Musée, Musée d’art moderne, Saint-Etienne, France 2000 Mimi does not forget!, Trafó Gallery, Budapest, Hungary

BiBliographieJózsef Mélyi: Arany a mosóporban, Élet és Irodalom, 2010/LIV. évf./41Garaczi László: Ami volt, és a mi lehet, 2010Kürti Emese: Szemüvegesek motorbiciklin Magyar Narancs xxI. évf./48.József Mélyi: “Concealing Art” Élet és Irodalom, 2008/52. évf./05Hermann Veronika: Jelenléted és hiányod, Balkon 2008/3Csatlós Judit: Térátrendezôdés, atelier_bp part I. , exindex.hu, 2008Emmanuel Hermange: Psyché, High-Angled Lowlands, NBK, Berlin, 2006Maja and Reuben Fowkes: Less is Beautiful, www.exindex.huBea Hock : Nemtan és publikart, Praesens, 2005Amiel Grumberg: L’europe à vingt-cinq, BeauxArts Magazine, No.239-avril, 2004, p.69.«Focus Photography», Flash Art, No.232-october 2003, p.87.Hajnalka Somogyi: Viszonyok és stratégiák. / Új Müvészet, 2003/9Anikó Erdösi: Az idö, a kép, a videó és a festészet. / Balkon, 2003/04Dóra Romek: Stop The Pigeon! / Új Müvészet, 2003/04Anikó Illés: A müvészet mérése - az Attendometer eredményei / Balkon, 2001/11Anikó Erdösi: Itt van az ösz - fiatalok a Mücsarnokban / Balkon, 2001/10Tamás Szönyei: Müvészet születik / Magyar Narancs, 2001/38.Eike Berg: Aranydukátok / Balkon, 2001/4-5-6Sándor Hornyik: Illúziók és reflexiók / Új Müvészet, 2000/5


Feketén-fehéren (Black-and-white)(2010)video-loop, 15 minutes



“Black-and-white” relies on the closing scene of Gyula Gazdag’s 1971 film, The Whistling Cobblestone, in which the artist’s paternal grand-father appeared as an extra. We can see a man on a train, who now looks in our eyes, now stares in front of him with eyes lowered. The video loop reflects the artist’s relation to, as well as questions and doubts about, his family and past, all the ambivalence and tension that exists between things experienced and known, between reason and sentiment.

Mariann Mayer, curator

exhibition view at Mûcsarnok/Kunsthalle, Budapest, 2010

watch the vidéo: http://www.vimeo.com/15741309



Dark room, with a few seconds long film excerpt projected on the wall, showing

a man ducking his head.

The large-skulled man with a careworn face is sitting on a train; behind him on the wall,

a picture is seen with the inscription Mezôkövesd Spa. He is wearing thick-framed

glasses; he lowers his head, then looks up, then down and up again, endlessly.

His prospects are limited to facing up and ducking his head in resignation — yes and

no, hope and failure. The film loop is taken from the motion picture A sípoló macskakô

/The Whistling Cobblestone directed by Gyula Gazdag. The man is Mátyás Esterházy,

the artist’s grandfather, who had a minor role in the closing scene of the film.

This is where a great deal of thoughts can come to our mind.

Starting from a minimalist gesture and taking advantage of another medium,

Marcell Esterházy seems to repeat the pattern created by his father, writer

Péter Esterházy, over a decade ago: the creation of a mythical father figure (in his mag-

num opus, Celestial Harmonies) and its disintegration (in its sequel, Revised Edition).

Instead of the hermeneutic endeavour, aestheticization, baroque wordiness and elegiac

approach, he chooses the gesture of revealing, condensed in just a few seconds. Eve-

rything described by the ancestors with the intricate and complex universes of history is

pressed into one dual sign. This is what has left for the descendants, what is fact. This

is how he appears to position himself against the dramatically rampant fate and imagi-

nation of the grandfather and father, respectively — against history and time. Inertness

and resignation: the past becomes a motion picture similarly to the artist’s earlier video

installation entitled v.n.p. v2.0 where his other grandfather appears as a closed, secre-

tive and silent singularity.

In the dark room, the drama of the man from the film is stripped to a single gesture.

Behind the harsh lines and despite the strong emanation we only perceive a yes and

a no. The dimensions of history and fate have faded away; they have lost depth and

complexity. The options of interpretation are converted to digital values, 1 and 0. We

know that this man’s life had crumbled through the complex tension between loyalty

and betrayal. What we see is a primary gesture, arbitrarily found and emphasized to us.

In the dark room, we perceive the mysterious traces of a tragic fate, featuring a single

immensely expanded protagonist. (...)

text by László Garaczi: Ami volt, és a mi lehet, in: Új Forrás 2011!01


(…)The phenomenon of alienation, of an exclusion provoked by the social inadequacy, immobility and slowness that are the characteristics of old age are the entry point of Marcell Esterházy’s film v.n.p. v2.0. The artist documented a family Sunday lunch in which his grandfather was a participant. In so doing he used an acceleration effect thanks to which his grandfather’s usual, very slow, movements look calm and noble, while the gestures and conversations of the other participants seem deformed, incomprehensible and absurd due to their excessive rapidity. Were it not for this editing trick, the grandfather’s slow movements would be comple-tely ‘uncinematic’, putting the viewer’s patience to the test. The procedure breathes life into, and restores the dignity of, the old man at the cost of reducing and distorting the time of the younger ones. Age and time thus assume the character of relativistic, social constructs. Slowness, as seen by Esterházy, brings to mind Sten Nadolny’s famous novel The Discovery of Slowness, in which slowness is presented as a virtue and is connected with heightened awareness, sensitivity and memory, confronted with the rapid, mad pace of modernity. The protagonist’s dignified concentration on every gesture, his celebration of the meal has one more aspect – it reveals the old man’s need to familiarise and tame the uncontrollable and chaotic reality through familiar gestures, repetitive rituals. Our contact with this slow-paced reality cannot, however, be completely successful: though appreciated, it remains alone in its otherness(…)

Joanna SokolowskaInterrupted Connection, 2006, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw

v.n.p. v2.0 (2004-2005), dvd, 12:00 min.

lien vers la vidéo: http://www.vimeo.com/15745474


v.n.p. v4.0 (2004/2010), dvd, 06:00 min.


v.n.p. v3.0/3 (2008), photo, 50 x 75 cm

Marcell Esterházy is concerned with traces and the absence of those to whom these belong. The v.n.p. v3.0 series focuses on the living environment of the artist’s deceased grandfather. The series gradually reveals the topography of presence of the one who is absent. The artist renders the homelike intimacy of the place tangible through these traces.

Gábor Pfisztner, art criticFIield of vision, contemporary hungarian photography at the turn of the millennium, 2010, ACAx


v.n.p. v3.0/1 (2008), photo, 50 x 50 cm

exhibition view at Galerie Aline Vidal, Paris, 2008


v.n.p. v3.0/2 (2008), photo, 50 x 50 cm

exhibition view at Galerie Aline Vidal, Paris, 2008


the monument destroyer (2010), résine synthétique, 95 cm


the monument destroyer (2010), résine synthétique, 95 cm


les lunettes de Miklós Mészöly(1996/2009)photo, 30 x 40 cm


les lunettes de Miklós Mészöly(1996/2009)

In 2009 I came across a 13-year-old photo series in my sister’s photo album. Snapshots I took back in 1996 during a family party - without any artistic purpose whatsoever. It all started as a joke, but now I turned these pictures into an art project in order to represent the power of photography and time in general. These images were made of my siblings and friends posing in front of a drapery, wearing the thick-glassed spectacles of the remarkable writer, Miklós Meszöly (1921-2001). The youngsters looking into the camera through the glasses of the famous Hungarian playwright, either in a tense or serious manner or, on the contrary, laughing, confused by the odd situation.


the golden Age of Erdély (2010) stencil, 60 x 60 cm


the golden Age of Erdély (2010) 16mm film box, concrete, matzo, glass


Esterházy has been working on atelier_bp since 2007, a photo series that presents the studios of artists who work in Budapest. Unlike in customary atelier photos, the artists are now absent, only the environments are shown in which they work. More often than not what we see are not classic studios but living rooms or bedrooms converted for the new function out of necessity. These spaces keep changing, so the photos are interesting documents, both for the owner and the viewer, of the conditions of a given time.

“It is however not the subject that fills Esterházy’s series with meaning but the genre of photography and its contemporary interpretation. With the gesture of photography, the maker of the image simply appropriates others’ art-not in the sense of stealing but in the postmodern sense of transfer. The atelier suddenly finds itself in the exhibition room: the place of production emerges in the place of presentation. Esterházy appropriates others’ environments, work and subjective impressions, and presents them in the gallery as his own work. And he presents not one but all, together, in a potentially endless series. His photos of ateliers are photos of collections, in the manner of that champion of appropriation, Louise Lawler, who built a series from images of museum collections ...

(József Mélyi: “Concealing Art” Élet és Irodalom, 52:5).

The photos are both very personal – because the objects a person lives among always reveal much about their owner – and reserved, thanks to the absence of persons. They also provide a chance for an interesting game: knowing the artworks, can you match the artists and the places where the works were realized?

exhibition view at Mûcsarnok/Kunsthalle, Budapest, 2010

atelier_bp (2007-2010), 30 x 20 cm, photo












one touch (2008), dvd, 2:30 min.



h.l.m. v 2.0 (2004) dvd-loop, 15:00 min.

exhibition view at The Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest



Butterfly Effect. (2006) video installation, 400 x 400 x 400 cmexhibition view at Neue Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, 2006


Ganz Project Part II.- Cantine (2009), intallation


arra(2007)installation, Place du samedi, Bruxelles


mistral I-III. (2003), 3 channel video installation, musique: Bánk Sáry

Mistral is a three-channel video installation. The videos feature the animated movement of clothes hung out to dry on the facade of a house in Marseille. The clothes are blown about by the mistral, the characteristic wind of the South of France. Interpreting them as score music, Bánk Sáry contemporary composer has written music to some of the animated videos.The audio material of the three videos heard simultaneously in the space of the installation produces the final sound of Mistral.



«Marcell Esterázy’s Gossip-machine is also designed for use and involvement. This installation is also meant as a medium of communication. Interactivity here becomes interpersonality, like in the course of chatting over the net. In Esterházy’s installation, voice rather than visual perception plays the lead role. What we see - two satellite-dishes with two human ears printed on them, in the function of gigantic ears as well as of loudspeakers - does nothing to explain the possibilities awaiting us, suggests next to nothing about the operation and use of the work. It takes ears rather than eyes to understand it. If in the ocularcentric tradition of the West, vision is the medium of access to truth, gossip is the medium of concealment and confabulation. Wath else could a gossiping machine be, but a gigantic ear that makes you lose eye contact by making you turn your backs against each other? Gos-sip is not about truth, vision, and the eye, but about the ear, about whispers, about talking behind other’s backs. Even if even the wall seems to have ears here, and rather big ones at that. Like gossiping Esterházy’s Gossip-machine presupposes intimacy, with at least two accomplices, two people talking and listening. The machine, wich at first sight looks more like a sculpture, operates in the cafeteria of the Trafó, in a public space, over the head and behind the back of the people sitting there, creates the intimate atmosphere necessary for gossiping, even though this atmosphere consists of the same air the unwitting others breathe. Gossiping is literally on and in the air.»

(Ágnes Berecz: Space of the beholder, Mimi does not forget, Trafó, 2000)

Gossip machine (2000) installation

Documents

MARCELL ESTERHÁZY · Marcell Esterházy // // +33 6 79 39 25 93 // [email protected] 2009 Left to Right, The Katzen Art Center, Washington, USA 2009 The Rain before it