Zsófia Keresztes puts on display her new, multi-sculpture installation in the Hungarian Pavilion that she created specifically for the Biennale Arte 2022. Her work deals with the stages in one’s search for identity. Its concept reaches back to Schopenhauer’s porcupine dilemma.
This metaphor was frequently used by the philosopher, and later by Freud and exponents of modern psychology, as a way of conveying the nature of intimacy. A human, as a social being, is incapable of living alone, and so constantly seeks others with whom to share thoughts, feelings and love. The exhibition takes as its associative starting point an episode from Antal Szerb’s 1937 novel Journey by Moonlight, When the protagonist arrives in Venice on honeymoon, he sets off alone to discover the mosaics of Ravenna, hoping to rekindle memories of his childhood. The porcupine dilemma fits in perfectly with the story of the novel: the relics of past cultures make the protagonist realise not only that individuals derive their self-identity from their own social and cultural background, but also that one’s present is unavoidably built upon the fragments of the past.
This exhibition does not paraphrase the events in the novel, but utilises as a poetic analogy the protagonist’s mystical experience of seeing the mosaics, in particular that moment when his sense of wholeness is shattered and his previously unchallenged worldview is called into question. It is through suffering doubt that a person grows able to confront his or her constantly changing self.
The exhibition, in four larger units, explores both the ambivalent relationship between past/present and future, and the stages by which people map out their own identity. Liberated in each other’s reflection from the burdens of common and individual experiences, the mutually referenced body fragments – separate yet existing as one community – attempt to achieve their final form.
