Exhibitions

Ferenc Szőke: Sounding Bowl

Opening reception: October 9,2014. Musical contribution by Zoltán Lantos (violin) 

Ferenc Szőke’s first drawings were made in February 2013 just around the time when Gallery8 was established. His first exhibition of video installations, sketches and descriptions was staged in February 2014 at Liget Gallery. Much part of his series displayed there under the title ‘Palace of Wonders’ resembled the world of Duchamp's ready-mades. The installations try to reveal the correlations of reality, sight, the medium and the self. The monitors in the works are objects forming part of reality, and, at the same time, tools distancing themselves and the viewer from their objective reality through the fact of virtuality.

The exhibition to be presented at Gallery8 will partly complement the series of video installations, but in a larger part it will include non-video-based conceptual works. The visions transpiring from the descriptions, and sketches connect typically distant times and places, bringing close faraway centuries and continents. The objects bring about special encounters and clashes that fuse West and East, past and present. The context of the 'pictures' and the venue is outlined by the traditional emotional aura of the concept of Roma, on top of the word's immediate usual semantic field. For the artist the word suggests, and at the same time identifies, the longing for breaking away from everyday locations, the attraction of adventure, of the ancient Nomadic instinct inherent in all of us, of the free roving soul of mankind ..., it represents the internal need for being in this world, and for breaking away in a both physical, and intellectual sense, and it connects our components perhaps in the same way as seven metals alloyed together to make a Tibetan singing bowl ...

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