Hungary

Szilárd Cseke‘s project Sustainable Identities has been selected to represent Hungary at the 56th Venice Biennale. Szilárd Cseke’s interactive installation, curated by Kinga German, addresses the issues of identity formation and sustainability.

The title Sustainable Identities ironically reflects upon the reduction of key concepts of our world to catchy slogans.
The curatorial concept builds on the space of the pavilion in Venice and Cseke’s mobile objects.
The focus of the installation is the cognitive space created by motion and electronics. The structure of the installation space consists of three units of artworks.
The wall-to-wall foil tubes contain moving balls propelled by fans. Their intersecting routes create a network, which provides an opportunity to reinterpret personal identities on a global basis. They draw attention to the limits, the interdependency and the determined nature of the ego and various directions of thought. Szilárd Cseke’s work thus situates individual, local viewpoints in a global system of interrelationships, making both the local and the global levels visible simultaneously.

In addition, the installation includes a breathing foil cushion that creates the impression of a ‘centre’ that maintains the system as it continuously inflates and deflates. In contrast with its material it has an organic feel, and with its stable position it stands as a counterpoint to the dynamic and mechanic web of identity shifts. It raises the question: what significances do the breathing mechanisms of our current environment bear for us?
As part of the curatorial concept, the experience begins with a sound installation by media designer Ábris Gryllus, who was brought in on the project by Cseke and German. The sounds of the continuously moving balls can be heard in the ‘noise space’ of the installation that is optically separated from the other artworks on display.
The inner courtyard of the pavilion, designed by students of the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, is transformed into an experimental space, where visitors may express their views on the themes of identity and sustainability, selecting the form of identity that they find the most significant and the most worthy of being sustained.

Szilárd Cseke (b. 1967, Pápa) lives and works in Budapest. Having finished his Master’s degree in painting, Cseke graduated from the University of Pécs in 1995. He began to create mobile objects in the mid-90s. His works demonstrate social and economic processes, with particular emphasis on the themes of migration and the search for identity.
He has garnered an array of awards, including the Munkácsy Prize in 2014 and the Derkovits Scholarship in 1997.
Cseke has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the most prestigious Hungarian institutions, such as the Kiscell Museum, the Kunsthalle and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest.
His works have been exhibited in several galleries, museums and international art fairs abroad, and they can also be found in well-known private and public collections.