KARINA MENDRECZKY & KATALIN KORTMANN JÁRAY
Oasis
23.02. – 07.05.2023
MQ Salon
Tue-Sun & holidays 10-18h l free admission
Environmental catastrophes and bleak prognoses for the future of life on earth – the climate crisis has become part of our everyday life, and is determining our life reality to an ever-greater extent. Our emotional relationship to nature is thus often burdened with guilt, since we human beings are responsible for the destruction of our environment. Even if there is the will to bring about a sustainable society, the political and individual scope for action nonetheless has its limits. The oscillation between power and powerlessness that results from this is shaping philosophical, ethical-moral, and spiritual discourses and raises questions that occupy many individuals.
In their artistic work, Karina Mendreczky and Katalin Kortmann Járay take up animist motifs and conceptual worlds. Animism is based on the belief that all elements in nature, both living creatures and inanimate objects have a spiritual essence. While animist thought has always been a central component of many indigenous religions, it is also currently being given new attention in Western societies: as a relationship to the world that emphasizes the mutual interdependency of all things, that regards the boundaries between species, between oneself and the world as fluid. Since with the environmentally destructive lifestyles of the present, a relationship to the world that is based on differentiation, objectification, and hierarchization becomes questionable.
Oasis is a subtly composed, extensive installation of sculptures, photographs, printed textiles, and drawings that is supplemented with a sound component. In it, Mendreczky (*1988 in Budapest, Hungary) and Kortmann Járay (*1986 Budapest, Hungary) take up both spiritual narratives and personal family histories and translate them into unusual pictures and objects that seem alien and familiar to us at the same time. Besides set pieces from nature like shells and sand, the space is populated with hybrid creatures with human traits and plant characteristics or that represent a merging of animal and object. They are free interpretations of elements and motifs from old fairy tales and myths. There are also spiritual-religious symbols such as the pomegranate, date palms, or folded hands, as well as historical photographs from family albums in which a particular aura is inherent. Female figures are positioned in various places in the space and sustain the mystical scenery.
As a whole, the objects form a magical-seeming, fairytale-like arrangement, a sort of surreal cabinet of curiosities that evokes the interconnectedness of all beings.
Curator: Verena Kaspar-Eisert
About the artists:
Karina Mendreczky (*1988) lives and works in Vienna and Budapest. She completed her studies of graphic design and printing (MA) at the Angewandte Universität (University of Applied Arts) in Vienna in 2015. From 2014 to 2015, she participated in an Erasmus exchange at the University of the Arts London in the field of print- and time-based media. After completing her diploma, she was awarded the Prize of the Kunsthalle Wien in 2015.
She has been represented by the Galerie Rudolf Leeb since 2019. Her works deal with human and social identity, on both a collective and perso-nal level. Childhood memories thus serve her as a starting point. Her works display recurring elements like photocollages, etchings, and scratchings on acrylic glass. She often works with translucent structures and makes use of the effect of light and shadow.
Katalin Kortmann Járay (*1986) lives and works in Budapest. She attended the Hungarian University of Fine Arts (HUFA) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich between 2006 and 2012. Her work has been represented in international group exhibitions, biennials, triennials, and award presen-tations. In her installations, she occupies herself with the effects of culture on human perception, the experience of globality, and the characteristics of a connection to locations associated with this. She looks for constellations of human perception along the interfaces between nostalgia and utopia, descendants and ancestors, childhood and adulthood, memory and fictions.