Németh, Hajnal: Twice Good Night (1999)

Hajnal Németh’s first video work is closely related to her sensually austere photographic works from the late nineties. As in the series Near Hajnal, Beside Balázs, the photo Eight to Eight is based on mirror symmetry and doubling, but the composition shows only a multiple of a single gender identity: the female body with the same swastika shape, a wolf’s head, a lamb’s legs, dressed in a man’s pyjamas, and with an X-shaped patch on her navel. Within one body, man and woman, predator and victim, two half-entities caught in an endless cycle, the eternal cycle of time. This was one of the “sources” of the video work Twice Good Night, in which the beast suddenly emerges from behind the seductive surface of the female body (make-up, wig, clothing). The duality of the realistic location (tiles, grout) scanned through a “magnifying glass” and the extra-real elements (mask), and the resulting tension, also emerges in the 1999 photographic work Homemade Trans, where the trance state of walking on water or floating above water is “merged” into everyday reality (the bathtub filled with foam water). Kriszta Dékei