2023, performance, sound poetry work, installation, poem
mounted photoseries, 6 × 65 × 90 cm, videoinstallation, 7 TV, dimensions variable, audio, 3’38’’, 4’26’’
photo and video: Levente Vigh
audio mastering: János Kristóf Bodnár, Szabina Péter
“Since 2018 I have been working intensively with nun art, both as an artist and as a PhD student at the University of Debrecen. After visiting the monasteries of Graz and Zug, I spent a silentium in the monastery of Tutzing in the autumn of 2021, where, in addition to the retreat and the exploration of the inner paths, I had the opportunity to study the daily activities of the nuns. According to the Horen (the nuns’ daily schedule) in Tutzing, 6:00, 11:45 and 17:45 are times of worship and prayer, which, while a solitary activity using mainly interior monologues, can become a shared experience in a common space. In the AnnaMaria sings re-enactment I capture this solitary and communal experience, focusing on the 4 main movements of prayer on the Hortobágy plain: entering and taking place in the space, standing, sitting and kneeling and then leaving the space, all of which have symbolic significance, as Peter Paul Kaspar describes it in his book Geheiligte Zeichen. All this in a temple drawn in sheer space, making use of the gesture of creatio ex nihilo, the creation out of nothing, where we can connect without walls. The sound material for the re-enactment is composed of morning, midday and evening hymns selected from the nuns’ Antiphonale (song and prayer book), as choir formed from my own voice also conveying the experience of being alone and yet together.” KT
According to French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director Antonin Artaud, a performing gesture can never be staged in the same way twice.[1] Kinga Tóth’s work is characterised by a hybridity of media, just as AnnaMaria sings – re-enactment is a complex installation in which she combines, with the help of her collaborators, sound poetry, photography and cinematography extended around poetry and performance. The work is a Gesamtkunstwerk also in the sense that it aims to affect several of our senses simultaneously and together. In the fabric of MODEM’s exhibition, the ensemble of works, designed to be displayed in a long corridor separating the two exhibition spaces, represents a unique boundary that conceptually disrupts the visitor’s experience of the exhibition in its entirety. However, the installation is not only a borderline because of its physical position, but also because of its genre, which openly pushes the boundaries of the formal language and the possibilities of artistic re-enactment. One of the central questions posed by Kinga Tóth’s re-enactment is whether it is possible to re-enact a religious liturgy rooted in church tradition, i.e., the ritual order of a community of faith, typically performed in a prescribed and systematized manner, in a place other than its usual sacral space. Can liturgical practices exhibiting different performative gestures be considered re-enactments? Can we think of re-enactment as a modus vivendi that defines man anthropologically?
In theatre and performing arts, the artist-performer stages and re-enacts existing images that he or she draws from time to time either from his or her own and/or others’ repertoires, from art history and/or from visual imagination. In these acts of performance, cultural traditions are reactivated and ritualised behaviours, choreographies or even scores, i.e., codes, travel through time as a system of signs. The body thus becomes similar to an “atlas of gestures”.[2] But in this case, we are not talking about an artistic performance, but about the re-enactment of a ritualised internal practice. Kinga Tóth’s performance re-enacting the daily routine of German nuns in the alien and profane space of the Hortobágy is the basis of the ensemble created for the exhibition. In this sense, one of the most interesting aspects of performative action, of artistic re-enactment as re-appropriation and re-embodiment, is the role of the artist’s body as a medium, which gives form and content not only to the practices of other, earlier “performers”, but also to the artist’s own body, which gives names to anonymous masses through its action. In this respect, the artist’s body as medium also becomes/can become a living medium of collective memory, the artist mediating between past and present through her own body, but doing so without eliminating the temporal distance between the two: not representing it, but (re)creating it. According to Cristina Baldacci, artists, as special creators of images, must—willingly or not—engage with a collective visual tradition that is linked to a timeless or multilayered and anachronistic time. Through a gesture of more or less conscious reappropriation, synonymous with reinterpretation and renewal, they may, by repeating a visual heritage of “origin”, actually come into contact with what was before, and whose attribution or origin is mostly undeclared and not necessarily relevant. Whatever they were called throughout the twentieth century according to their various connotations and contexts—whether archetypes (Jung), pathos formulas (Warburg) or reproductions (Benjamin)—ultimately they all are recurring images that reappear repeatedly and travel through time.[3] Thus, this kind of image-embodying re-enactment is a possible way to create new stories and meanings through direct comparison of the “rehabilitated” image with the present, enabling in this way an understanding of the past that privileges
visuality and performativity.
[1] Artaud quoted in: Jones, Amelia: The Now and the Has Been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History, in: Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, ed. Jones Amelia–Heathfield, Adrian, Bristol, Intellect, 2012, p. 11.
[2] Baldacci, Cristina:Reenactment: Errant Images in Contemporary Art, in: Re-: An Errant Glossary, eds. Holzhey, Christoph F. E. – Wedemeyer, Arnd, Cultural Inquiry, 15, Berlin, ICI Berlin, 2019, pp. 57–67.
[3] ibid. p. 58. and see: Agamben, Giorgio: Notes on Gesture, in: Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, trans. Heron, Liz, London, Verso, 1993, pp. 133–140, here p. 139.