A BETTER TIME, THEY SAY — Group exhibition by A Whale of a Bad Time

A Better Time, They Say

Ivor Almásy, Mátyás Erményi, István Felsmann, Márk Fridvalszki, Sári Gink, Dorottya Kalocsai, Bálint Katona, Katalin Kortmann Járay, Karina Mendreczky, Éva Szombat, Balázs Máté Tóth, Márton Emil Tóth

Curated and organised by Bálint Ács, Sári Gink, Dorottya Kalocsai, Zsófia Kókai, Katalin Kortmann Járay, Karina Mendreczky

At 1111 Gallery, Budapest and Gábor Sillye Culture House

October 20 — December 10, 2021

Photography by Mátyás Gyuricza and Zsuzsanna Simon

It is important to note that the exhibition took place intentionally in two different spaces with a difference of a couple of weeks. In October, the exhibition material was presented in the unrenovated rooms of the culture house in a small rural town, and right after in November in a gallery in the capital (Budapest).

“The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future became outmoded, while nostalgia, for better or worse, never went out of fashion, remaining uncannily contemporary.”

— Svetlana Boym

The ongoing exhibition A Better Time, They Say is part of a travelling group-exhibition and event-series called A Whale of a Bad Time organized by a curatorial team formed by six Hungarian artists, curators and theoreticians. The focus of their project is the regional (East-Central European) perception of the era between the late 1980s and the early 2000s.

The project deals with private and collective memories of Generation Y, which, in the local context, also includes the first generation to be born free after the fall of the Sovietunion. The project contributors are in and around their thirties, which means that the aforementioned era overlaps with their childhood. The title of the program, A Whale of a Bad Time, also reflects a so-called flashbulb memory. The death of József Antall, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Hungary, was announced as breaking news on TV during a Duck Tales episode (titled A Whale of a Bad Time) in 1993. This was the ‘free born’ generation’s first encounter with politics. The art projects presented at the exhibitions deal with various motifs referring to events, cultural phenomena and aesthetics that may act as similar memories to the vast majority of the Hungarian Generation Y.

When social scientist Roger Foster describes the adornoian relation to Proust, he highlights the connections between childhood and utopias: ‘Adorno often writes about childhood experience as a sort of refuge from the alienated, deadening forms of experience that prevail in the world of late modernity. Adorno developed this elevated sense of childhood, as a kind of placeholder for utopian social possibility […]’ (Foster, 2018.) This lies at the core of the program. The representation of the ‘liberated’ 1990s era childhood is an allegory for lost possibilities, but, paradoxically, also for possible futures, both in local and global context. The project aims to refresh a certain collective mentality by sharing memories and experiences, by highlighting hopes and desires, but also by underlining the uncertainty inherited from failed utopias and promises.

With regard to the former Socialist Region, Stephen Holmes and Martin Müller point out that the “The spread of consumerism in the former Eastern Bloc turned attention away from high politics.” Right after the regime changed, the symbolic gesture of participation in the Western individual freedom and lifestyle manifested itself in the acquisition of its products. According to Boris Buden, the end of postcommunism means the end of an illusion: the end of the illusion of Western prosperity in the former socialist region.

But in the past decade, not only have the illusions of the society of a region begun to disappear, but on the global level, faith in the future also seems to be lost. The backward objects of socialism carry the warning remnants of an unfulfilled utopian vision, while the objects of the 1990s evoke a common memory of an over-optimistic vision in a global context.

To quote Svetlana Boym, nostalgic retrospect is not merely an individual state, but a symptom of our time, a pandemic that seems to be intensifying with modernity. The person or persons experiencing nostalgia transform history into a private and collective mythology, by which time becomes a space that can be traversed again. We have a responsibility, we need to distinguish between actual and, over time, changed and coloured by emotional “lost home” memories that we longin for.

Through the works, participating artists examined their own past for both the local and global present (consumption, sustainability, local endowments) while playfully pointing out the hopes and needs for more ethical and sustainable practice, as well as more democratic norms, both for their own sake and for the common good of global society.
Both the current exhibitions and the long-term collaborative art project that encompasses it seek to join a discourse that focuses on examining the role of post-socialist childhood in collective memory. In recent years, for example, the institutional practices of the Childhood War Museum in Sarajevo or the Reconnect-recollect projects at the University of Tampere show that the study of childhood memories is now an unavoidable canonical part of research on history, social memory and cultural anthropology.

A Whale of a Bad Time

DANDIES LOITER THROUGH THE NIGHT — Group exhibition at Garage Gallery, Prague

ART IS LIFER — Jeremy at WallStreet, Fribourg, Switzerland

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