2007–2023
installation, dimensions variable

“Characteristic moment of contemporary history in which not only the two successive systems are represented, but also the transitional state separating them.” JSz

The national emblem can be seen every day on schools, general practicioners’ offices and at the entrances of municipal offices, but because of habit, the coat of arms can easily remain invisible, falling out of sight.

The Rákosi coat of arms decorated with stylized wheat ear and hammer, and with a red star in the centre was the official state emblem between 1949 and 1956, during the socialist dictatorship, and was replaced by the puritan Kossuth coat of arms for a short period of time, during the revolution. In 1990, the red-starred emblem with wheat ear of The Hungarian People’s Republic of Kadar regime was replaced by the crowned coat of arms. The law stated that all public institutions shall change their coat of arms, which request was fulfilled in one way or another: the changes were carried out by scrapings, splotchings and temporary tapings.

In many cases, solutions that are meant to be temporary are still on the wall after thirty years, some of which have been worn away and cracked by the weather; the glue has peeled off, revealing the previously covered symbols that have emerged from beneath, thus creating a kind of bizarre political-heraldic collage, a palimpsest. The red star peeking out from under the Holy Crown and the wheat wreath striking out next to the shield are the fading signs of the past, the obtruding traces of the former regime. Although the double coat of arms is a heraldic oxymoron, in reality it does exist, and Szolnoki shows the limits of this official remembrance trying to cover up the past and the policy of controlled forgetting.

József Szolnoki has reached the discourse sedimentology he invented through the analysis of the legendary toposes of Hungarian national culture. Through a genealogical study of phenomena such as the 150-year-old ban on toasting with beer, the Curse of Turan, or the groups of Huns still living in Germany to this day. In line with this, since the nineties he has also been carrying out renegade heraldic research, drawing our attention to the blind spots of various public buildings. As a pseudo-anthropologist or documentarist of Hungary’s recent past he has been studying these forgotten, official “double coat of arms” for years, which he interprets as a kind of urban fossil, an imprint of the visual culture of an era.