Symbolically fighting systematic erasure, Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi virtually brings a well-known statue of György Lukács, which was removed from a public park in Budapest in 2017, back to the public realm in Boston. She projects the image of the Hungarian statue on the façade of Boston Center for the Arts, offering Lukács’ ghost-like presence in a very different urban public space.

This public projection project is presented within the scope of the In the Words, In the Bones exhibition – curated by Magdalena Moskalewicz. It has been moving beyond Boston, last month in conjunction with the (de)fault-lines exhibition curated by Ofra Harnam in Tel Aviv and will be appearing in Vienna next.

About In the Words, In the Bones participating artist Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi:
Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi is interested in absence and erasure in relation to the Communist history in Hungary and its post-communist, often nationalistic present. New technologies give her the power to symbolically fight the erasure. The artist wishes to examine issues of identity that go beyond the nationalistic calibration of belonging.

From exhibition curator Magdalena Moskalewicz:
The statue of the Marxist philosopher and influential literary theorist was removed in 2017 from the Szent Istvan park, on the grounds of the former Jewish neighborhood, where it had been installed in 1985. It was one of the many attempts of the current Hungarian government to erase the country’s Communist past, entangled with the nationalist sentiments grounded in anti-Semitism.