Pathos Management, No. 5
Conversation series about the past and the present of topoi in Hungarian art
Time: October 22, 2019, 6 pm to 8 pm
Venue: Vasas Szakszervezeti Szövetség Székháza [Vasas Federation of Metalworkers' Union], Magdolna u. 5-7., Budapest 1086
# 5 Katharina Roters – József Szolnoki, Anamnesis:, video,
8 mins, 2016
Pathos management is a non-existent concept created from the fusion of “pathos formula” and anger management. Thus, one of the sources of this ephemeral concept goes back to psychology and social psychology, and the other to art history, specifically to Aby Warburg’s work. Warburg, in one of his letters, described himself as a psycho-historian of culture, who examines how visual topoi expressing strong emotions, passions and sufferings, the ecstatic and the tragic migrated from one historical-cultural era to another. As a modernization and updating of the iconological method, pathos management looks at how Hungarian visual culture has dealt with Hungarian regime changes over the past hundred years, how it related to the ideas and feelings these changes brought up, and how it has re-interpreted its own topoi and pathos formulas. On the one hand, the series examines which topoi, symbols, and allegories of Hungarian art have become once again current, and what happened to these topoi over the course of independent Hungary’s first century.
Katharina Roters – József Szolnoki, Anamnesis
"The strengthening of the screen culture and electronic display in the field of representation and communication has not only facilitated the production or falsification of facts and data, but has also heightened the skepticism of objectivity, which led to a newer and ever widespread cult of tangible objects, documents, and authentic memories not only in cultural studies but also in contemporary art, which, could be called processing the past. […]. In Hungary likewise, processing the past has been in full swing since the last change of regime, but surprisingly there are only a few artistic ventures with meta-level analyses (theoretically) like the exhibition of Katharina Roters and József Szolnoki. The duo not only wished to shed light on the darker spots of a family’s past, they also critically reflects on the process of remembering and creating the past ... ” Sándor Hornyik: The Hackers of Identity. The Memory Politics of Katharina Roters and József Szolnoki's work. Artmagazin online (In Hungarian, http://artmagazin.hu/artmagazin_hirek/az_identitas_hekkerei.3593.html?pageid=119)
Regime Changes
Over the course of 2019-2020, tranzit.hu launches the events series entitled Regime Changes, which, in the form of lectures, exhibitions, research presentations, thematic magazine issues, examines what real and symbolic changes arise from political turning points in a given era. How do views and narratives live on underneath the surface so as to emerge in a re-interpreted form as the dominant discourse of another regime? Case studies commissioned or adapted for the series present the shifting, often politically appropriated and contradictory interpretations of political, social and cultural events of the past hundred years.
