Vytautas Kumza
Artist Feature
Every week an artist is featured whose single image was published by Der Greif. The Feature shows the image in the original context of the series.
Balázs Fromm - Journey To Cosmos
Mar 14, 2018
Bertalan Farkas was the one and only Hungarian cosmonaut, who was launched to space from the Baikonur cosmodrome with Valeri Kubasov in 1980, during the joint socialist space program. A Journey Through Cosmos explores the voyage of Farkas, yet, relies on the collective memory on exploring space and the nostalgic phenomenon’s of the socialist era’s fabricated reality after the Soviet-US space race. As our expectations towards affordable space travels in the near future slowly drifting away, I started to rebuild the whole story of Farkas, collecting yearbooks, relics, postcards and scientific publications, based on his training, the launch of the Soyuz 36 spaceship, and the Soviet-Hungarian propaganda acts, after Farkas spent more than a week successfully in space.
The brief concept of getting a Hungarian cosmonaut into outer space, I believe, was something more than just a regular achievement of the People’s Republic of Hungary. Farkas’s journey inspired thousands, who were already resolute to get to know more about our universe, and also, opened many routes and possibilities in future scientific programmes in Hungary. After the collapse of the USSR, the dreams of a new space programme became an unreachable destination, to all, who were willing to participate. The memory of a glorious enterprise disappeared, with all the prints of a once was noble cause.
A Journey Through Cosmos not only deals with Bertalan Farkas’s short travel in the cosmic orbit, but tries to rewrite and compose a fictional Soviet-Hungarian space programme within, through the collective memory of our past, and based on our general acquaintance on space travels. Since more than 35 years passed, these memories are representing something else to us, mostly for the younger generations, which is often a just a warm heart feeling, toward a playful experience of the past.
Besides, getting our fragments rearranged, I tried to put my emphasis on an almost forgotten topic, which still has some minor presence after the vanish of a controversial political system. These fragments, as the photographs of the series, reminds us, that reaching outer space is once truly happened, at all cost.
Artist Blog
The blog of Der Greif is written entirely by the artists who have been invited to doing an Artist-Feature. Every week, we have a different author.
Published in:
»Der Greif #10«
As far as the eye can reach – Balazs Fromm
Mar 21, 2018 - Balázs Fromm
Color reference circle polaroid from my series titled As far as the eye can reach. See more in previous Artist-Blog posts.
As far as the eye can reach – Balazs Fromm
Mar 20, 2018 - Balázs Fromm
Still presenting my ongoing project from 2k17, titled “As far as the eye can reach” .
What is the very own property of a digital image? Does the reckoning of the analogue format changed our cognition forever? What could we perceive, and how, during the vast amount of online feeds circling through our daily basis?
As I keep asking myself these questions, I start to realise that we could think on photography as a tool. A tool, which is a reconnoiter device as well, and could reveal the hidden secrets of our present, future, and past. Also, a tool for tracking our vision, cheating our mind, and causing many specific emotions, impacts, which mostly we could not describe in single words. Photography, therefore, is a tool of language as well, merely of almost every individual human being. Yet, as a universal language, the meaning of “words” are often not the “same”, as we except.
During my project, I started building, crafting and fabricating my several “words”, so called individual messages, to be part of the photographic language. As the pictures, as individual scenarios seems quite different from each other, I need the viewers attention, him or hers own photographic language, and their toolkit , to establish a unique, unrepeatable connection between the images.
As the world wide web reduced the approach of “getting” into reality, the series deals with how could we perceive truth through images, and raises questions about whether a single photograph could still have the impact on our daily basis, or photography itself is has been reduced into a post-modern level, where the hidden message, or let’s say, “truth” or “fake” does not count anymore.
As far as the eye can reach – Balazs Fromm
Mar 16, 2018 - Balázs Fromm
I would like to present my recent/ongoing series from 2k17, titled “As far as the eye can reach” in the following weekly artist blog posts.
What is the very own property of a digital image? Does the reckoning of the analogue format changed our cognition forever? What could we perceive, and how, during the vast amount of online feeds circling through our daily basis?
As I keep asking myself these questions, I start to realise that we could think on photography as a tool. A tool, which is a reconnoiter device as well, and could reveal the hidden secrets of our present, future, and past. Also, a tool for tracking our vision, cheating our mind, and causing many specific emotions, impacts, which mostly we could not describe in single words. Photography, therefore, is a tool of language as well, merely of almost every individual human being. Yet, as a universal language, the meaning of “words” are often not the “same”, as we except.
During my project, I started building, crafting and fabricating my several “words”, so called individual messages, to be part of the photographic language. As the pictures, as individual scenarios seems quite different from each other, I need the viewers attention, him or hers own photographic language, and their toolkit , to establish a unique, unrepeatable connection between the images.
As the world wide web reduced the approach of “getting” into reality, the series deals with how could we perceive truth through images, and raises questions about whether a single photograph could still have the impact on our daily basis, or photography itself is has been reduced into a post-modern level, where the hidden message, or let’s say, “truth” or “fake” does not count anymore.
