“The image of our surroundings is made up of both reality as it is in itself and that which is a creation of the mind. The world seen and imagined.”
(Imre Lázár Baji)
We are witness to a session at the psychologist as we enter the project room and look up at the video film screened on the facing wall. A sense of hypnosis unfolds, as a patient shifts into an altered state of consciousness proceeding along the instructions of the psychologist.
In this latest work Mária Chilf breaks with the forms of expression we are accustomed to from her. Her installation uses neither peculiar substances, nor objects to build the installation, nor mounts an exhibition from pictures that carry the surreal, archaic or organic world of forms. To meet the challenge of putting on a show in the project room, where a work must reflect on the given space, she has created a piece dealing with the process of becoming in a work of art. She sets the conceptual and the intuitive processes of creation up against each other, so filling the empty space with meaning.
The artist draws upon hypnosis as an aid in her search of her subconscious, as she looks for that picture which she might exhibit. The function of the right half of the brain, which is responsible for intuition and the making of pictures, becomes predominant during the state of consciousness achieved through hypnosis. At the moment of going under, when the arms of the artist (who is the person under hypnosis) inadvertently swings into motion, the film is suddenly discontinued, and the two little ‘chilfmarias’ who appear in her palm, argue about a mysterious picture in a scene of parody. Their squabble is cut short by the sound of machine-gun fire.
Across from the artist’s conceptual experiment we may observe another film, in which a man found in the milling crowd of the city feels/conducts the sounds of the world around him with a soft, sensual flow of movements. We are confronted by a person in a state of consciousness allowing intuition to manifest itself freely.
However strange, Double Trouble is successful in its very failure, for the power of that particular picture is secure in its being concealed.
Curator of the exhibition: Anna Bálványos
