EDITION 7
SZABOLCS KISSPÁL - AMOROUS GEOGRAPHY
nationality: HUNGARY
duration: 11'53"
made in: 2012
previous screenings:
biography:
synopsis:
Szabolcs KissPál has a multidimensional practice, he is working across a wide range of media, including photography, video, installation and con- ceptual interventions. Moving on the intersection of new media and visual arts, his works focuses on issues related to perception and on social and political issues of the contemporary society.
His installations and videos were widely shown internationally in Europe, Asia, and the United States, in venues such as the Venice Biennial, the Whitstable Biennial, W139 Amsterdam, NCCA Moscow, the Seoul Media Art Biennial, Apexart and ISCP in New York
He lives and works in Budapest, Hungary.
Szabolcs Kisspál's docu-fiction lays out the architecture and ethnographic space of Budapest Zoo, along with the long European history ob objectification of the Other and the post-Trianon discourse on Transylvania. The discourse constructs the otherness and identity of the region through a system in which Transylvania appears as the ultimate source of authentic and essential "Hungarianness", while at the same as the place that is archaic, backwards and pre-modern. The double system of Transylvanian-Hungarian "pecularities" is thus a product of a colonial imagination which, as an instrument for the symbolic occupation of space, bring the Other into being not merely as a subject of desire, but also of domination, in other words, as a 'miniature replica'. (Zoltán Kékesi)