Quest of Query: The Menace Of Obvious

 The last part of the exhibition series Art Under a Dangerous Star, which reflects on the forms of contemporary fascism, is the presentation of the collaborative project Quest of Query: The Menace of the Obvious by Athens-based artist Theodoros Zafeiropoulos and tranzit.hu curator Eszter Szakács. A productive dialogue that initially started in Bergen, Norway, forms a “bridge for production,”—, connecting also the countries of Norway, Greece, and Hungary—, leading to the exhibition. In 2013 both of them took part simultaneously in a residency program at two different institutions in Bergen: the AiR Bergen program at the USF Vertfel center for the the arts and culture, and the contemporary art center Hordaland Kunstsenter. In the video installations presented at the exhibition, under the initial idea that “landscape is not innocent,” the observatory and metaphorical readings are in focus, where it is through the attention to the obvious and the details of landscapes, bodies, or architecture, that the socio-political appears. A national parade, a series of flags, a rafter at the harbor, a description of imagery: the artist intervenes into invisible and dominant mechanisms, and so that through documentation and meticulous work, he could fabricate them into ambiguous observations. In his videos, the harmless course of events transform into disturbing snapshots. Even though all the art works shown at the exhibition in Budapest were filmed and are based in Bergen, Norway has no particular locality in Quest of Query ; it appears just as a heterogeneous narrative, a topos, a metaphorical “no-space” that serves as a site of inspection. The quest, even thought it is seemingly across three countries; it is not an odyssey in physical space and time, but rather a perpetual intellectual journey of decipherment. The words “Quest” and “query” are related; etymologically, they both originate from the Latin word quaerere , to ask, to seek. A quest of a query, like an Ouroboros, persistently questions the questions.

Curated by Eszter Szakács