I got a letter, lájf – We only use electronic communication. Solo exhibtion by Nóra Juhász
2025. Jun. 21. - 2025. Sep. 21.
Nóra Juhász’s new project explores the authenticity of communication, the identity of museums, and the vanishing world of letter-writing culture through a correspondence conducted in the name of a fictional postal museum. Emerging from this exchange is a multilayered installation that serves as both an ironic and emotional investigation into the historical significance of postal services and the impersonality of the digital age.
The project originally began as an unconventional performance drawing on the traditions of mail art and the practice of ‘catfishing’—the creation of deceptive online identities. Disguised behind the persona of a fictitious institution, the artist initiated contact with various museums to map the boundaries of authentic communication and examine the fragility of trust in the digital era.
The title „ I got a letter, lájf – We only use electronic communication” cleverly encapsulates the project’s central theme: the aesthetics of misunderstanding, deception, and re-coding. The first part of the title is a Hungarian misheard lyric of OPUS’s 1984 hit Live is Life—an ironic, nostalgic meme that playfully references the fading culture of letter-writing. The second half, by contrast, is a mechanical and impersonal phrase taken from an actual institutional reply: it was the automated response a postal museum sent back to the artist’s questionnaire. The contrast between the two quotes vividly highlights the fault line between personal, trust-based relationships and digital, institutional communication — a divide the exhibition sensitively brings into focus.
The project originally began as an unconventional performance based on the method of “catfishing”—the use of deceptive online identities. Disguised as a fictional institution, the artist initiated correspondence with postal museums to explore the boundaries of authentic communication and critically examine how trust is shaped in the digital age.
The exhibition space blends digital and analog elements into a complex installation: a hologram, letters printed on plexiglass sheets, quotations running along LED strips, a grotesque postman figure, a winged bicycle, and an indecipherable postal horn conjure the absurd, almost post-apocalyptic afterlife of message delivery. The spatial design is inspired by the pneumatic tube system of the Museum für Kommunikation in Berlin.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a reinterpretation of Pál C. Molnár’s unrealized 1955 fresco design The History of Telecommunications. The original work depicted the evolution of communication as a linear, male-centric narrative of technological progress. In contrast, Juhász offers a fractured, dystopian vision in which female and non-human figures also take part—rewriting the traditional order of progress and representation.
Rather than simply commemorating, the exhibition reshuffles. It operates as a fictional archive where document and manipulation, reality and fiction are purposefully blurred. Nóra Juhász’s work not only presents but disorients, raising unsettling questions about what we consider credible in a world where even institutional communication rests on uncertain foundations.
The exhibition was realized through collaboration with the Postal Museum in Budapest and the Delizsánsz Exhibition Space in Debrecen.
Curator: Krisztián Gábor Török