The Lingering Presence: On Archives, Memory, and the Dead Who Refuse to Disappear
Exhibition by Erekle Chinchilakashvili
Opening: 21 March 2025, 5 pm
Venue: Lehetőségek tere (Práter street 63., 1083 Budapest)
Opening speech by artist Balázs Kicsiny, professor at the Doctoral School of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts (HUFA)
Additional Event:
28 March 2025, 5 pm - Guided tour with the Artist
4 April 2025, 6 pm - Finissage
We are pleased to host the dissertation exhibition of Erekle Chinchilakashvili, a Georgian artist living in Budapest. The multimedia installation of the DLA researcher artist of the HUFA is organized around the notions of memory—and necessarily forgetting—, the problems of preservation, and the object-oriented culture. Chinchilakashvili's work is based on the duality of artistic research and creative practice. Below is the exhibition concept formulated by the artist.
The exhibition is open until 4 April during the opening hours of the Space of Opportunity or by appointment.
"The typical historical archive contains documents that refer exclusively to past events; it presumes the ephemerality, the mortality of the life it documents. And indeed, the immortal does not need to be documented; only the mortal does." Boris Groys [1]
The archive is not only a site of preservation or a space of forgetting. It exists in a paradoxical state—holding onto the remnants of the past while acknowledging that the act of collecting is, in itself, a quiet form of erasure. In The Lingering Presence, we confront the ambiguous role of the archivist, the one who records, classifies, and retrieves names from history's recesses—only to realize that retrieval is never neutral. The archivist documents the absence, formalizing the vanishing.
This exhibition follows a fictional archivist tasked with researching war casualties, but this task is not simple. Rather than being a repository of truth, the archive seems like a construct—a battleground where history is curated, memory is arranged, and the lost are cataloged. He moves through a space filled with ghostly presences, with faces that look back at him from photographs. Their expressions are fixed in the past and can never be fully accessed.
We are accustomed to thinking of images as sites of presence, proof that something—or someone—was somewhere. Yet, documentation does not merely reproduce reality but re-constructs its visibility. A war casualty's photograph obviously does not restore their existence—it confirms their disappearance. In this way, the exhibition questions the ethics of representation: Is memory an act of preservation or an extension of loss?
The exhibition space operates as an archivist’s mind—a memorial to forgetting disguised as remembrance—the traces of half-memories, the fragmented records, the materials that promise history but deliver only its hollowed-out remains. There is no restoration here, no redemption. Only objects on shelves, over-illuminated pictures in frames, and the cold architecture of memory in an era where history is subject to curation.
Erekle Chinchilakashvili is a Georgian multidisciplinary artist based in Budapest. His work focuses on the intersections of reality and imagination, exploring the fragility of human perception and its ongoing transformation. He engages with various media, including painting, installation, found objects, and video to examine issues of individual and collective memory. By combining diverse visual materials, he constructs new pseudo-realities: these layered memory spaces are saturated with emotion and attempt to invite a confrontation with the viewer, offering the dual possibility of revelation and transformation of experience.
[1] Boris Groys, Art Power. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006, p. 98.
