The beaten track is a metaphor for habit, of cultural and perceptual conditioning, which confines the world to a recognizable order of forms. Beyond this lies a departure from order, a transgression of the boundaries of perception, knowledge, and meaning, a mapping of side roads, blind spots, and unfamiliar spaces. The international group exhibition Access Is off the Beaten Track seeks inroads to these. The exhibits open up spaces and experiences where the perception of reality is disrupted and certainty is replaced by the strangeness lurking within the familiar.
In his book The Weird and the Eerie, British philosopher, cultural researcher, and critic Mark Fisher (1968–2017) distinguishes between two modes of perception and existence that reflect the anxieties of modernity and late capitalist culture. The words weird and eerie are difficult to translate – their Hungarian counterparts range over “strange,” “odd,” “creepy,” and “ominous” – but in Fisher’s interpretation, both of these phenomena cause the subject to lose its centralized role under the influence of some peculiar force and consequently changes its perception of the order of the world. It falls under the influence of something that is beyond its basic perception, interpretation, and experience.
Our exhibition takes this distinctive experience as its point of departure and attempts to make its various forms perceptible and accessible without claiming to capture it in its entirety or seeking to illustrate it exhaustively. Rather, it attempts to reveal a pattern of sorts in relation to the metaphysical, psychological, and political instability that defines contemporary experience.
In recent years, the stylistic features and motifs of the Gothic have become increasingly prevalent in the visual arts; artistic representation, aiming to address the self-definition and the internal processes of humans, as well as the external threats to the human world, often finds forms and narrative modes in the aesthetic tools of fantasy and horror. Decay, the instability of the body and matter at large, and the perception of hidden and invisible forces in art are symptomatic expressions of a collective destabilization that affects the subject, identity, the environment, and our perception of reality alike. Today, the Gothic and the aesthetic experiences closely associated with it are metaphors not so much for an uncanny, unburied past, but for an uncertain perception of reality in the present. The exhibition seeks to explore this contemporary restlessness, the mental and physical spaces defined by absence, tension, and fragmentation.
Fisher’s analysis ultimately arrives at the so-called eerie calm state, which occurs when confrontation with the unknown no longer evokes fear but manifests itself in the form of a peculiar calmness. Eerie calm carries within it the possibility of overcoming shock: the realization that stepping into the unknown, vanishing and dissolving into it, can also be the beginning of a new way of perceiving and being. The Access Is off the Beaten Path exhibition attempts to open a gateway to an immersion into the unknown, towards the aesthetics of vanishing.
Curators: Máté Zsófia, Patrik Steinhauser
Exhibiting artists: Genevieve CAPITANIO, Roland FLEXNER, Martin GERBOC, HORVÁTH Ádám, KLÁJÓ Adrián, METZING Eszter, Mihael MILUNOVIC, China MOYA, Jina PARK, Leopold RABUS, Richard STIPL, SZÁSZ Sándor
