The work was part of a larger installation created by Zsófia Keresztes for her exhibition entitled After Dreams: I Dare to Defy the Damage for the 59th Venice Biennale in the Hungarian Pavilion. The mosaic sculpture installation, consisting of amorphous body fragments representing the stages of the search for identity, depicted the uncertainties of our time, our sense of life, and the ambivalent relationship of past and present to the future. Keresztes also calls her sculptures 21st century totems. Her hybrid creature in a rolling container cart is at once menacing and vulnerable, at once sensual and frightening. The cold blue teardrops hanging from spider web-like metal chains – fossilised remnants of pain and pleasure – seem like archaic props from a post-digital world after dreams. Keresztes’s works fitted well into the unusual main stage of the 2022 Venice Biennale, which was also called the “Women’s Biennale” because of the large female participation, as the female aspects have never been so strongly represented at the Biennale. The vast majority of the invited exhibitors at the centre exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, were women. As in the other national pavilions, the Hungarian Pavilion is characterised by a predominance of men: in the 129-year history of Hungarian participation, apart from Keresztes, there have been only two occasions when a female artist has had a solo exhibition.
Géza Boros