Hungary is a small country with a long tradition in media art - from Moholy-Nagy as a pioneer of photography over the Balázs Béla Film Studio to Gábor Body, initiator of the video art magazine Infermental. Also in contemporary video works experiments, a great sensuality for content and visuality have remained, with international success and still not know enough.
BLOCK 1 ANIMATIONEN
János Sugár: Typewriter of the Illiterates
2001, Video, 8'00"
born 1958 in Budapest, lives and works in Budapest
The oeuvre of János Sugár includes works ranging form complex installations to video, to sculpture, concept art, photo and drawing. His characteristic language of forms include abstract spatial and graphic constructions and symbols. His social and political sensitiveness is far from moralising, at the same time, it is one that reveals the true essence of phenomena ironically and analyses it systematically.
Already in the 1980s, Sugár was one of the most influential young artists. He was a member of the Indigó Group, and then one of the leaders of the Béla Balázs film studio. After the political transition in Eastern Europe, he was one of the founders of the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, in 1992, and he participated in Documenta IX.
His most widely known video, the Typewriter of the Illiterate, consists of images cut from newspapers and magazines, with a Kalashnikov submachine-gun on each of them. The images are morphed into one another around the submachine-gun. The images add up to media analysis with a direct emotional effect.
www.videospace.c3.hu/artists/janossugar
http://geertlovink.org/interviews/interview-with-janos-sugar-2/
Eszter Szabó: 179,-
2009, Looped Video
born 1979 in Budapest, lives and works in Budapest
Eszter Szabó belongs to the young generation that started their artistic carrier after the fall of the Berlin Wall, using media art in a natural way as part of their studies and daily life.
Her art explores two main areas: painting, which is a recording of manual gestures, and moving images on screens. Strong and characterisic images emerge from the combination of these two media. The small watercolours are sensual and precise portraits: everyday people with shopping bags, big bellies, unfitting clothes, depicted with delicate but accurate lines.
In her animations like the series People or the video 179,- (stands for 179,- Hungarian Forint, about 40 Euro cent, with the sound of a special offer prize) Eszter Szabó combines traditional technique with digital language in a peculiar way. Szabó creates an accurate portrait of everyday people, she records short scenes on videos of painted images of everyday people - these works are the re-animations of archetypal figures.
www.videospace.c3.hu/artists/eszterszabo
Blog and video previews by Eszter Szabó: www.eszterszabo.hu