Orsolya HORVATH

A visitor can ultimately only visit an exhibition. The recipient’s final horizon of experience — that is, their pre-categorized state of consciousness — sets limits, thereby closing them off from the transcendent. It is precisely this boundary that the exhibition Techniques to the Unknown seeks to challenge and surpass.

The individual artist is only able to dismantle their own genre boundaries to a limited extent; more often than not, they unconsciously maintain these frameworks. Yet our experimental exhibition maps the boundaries of the artists’ applied genres along two dimensions. On the one hand, it examines the limitations of fine art, design, and interior architecture, as well as their forms of realization separated by institutionalized conventions. On the other hand, it seeks to create interaction between these artistic forms and the sacred, thereby setting in motion the — presumably eroded — connection between the artist, the recipient, and other categorized forms of life and the spiritual wholeness of authentic existence.

Today’s hyper-individualized, high-tech social structures, which exchange existence for lifestyle, can no longer show a new dynamic path or direction; they cannot overcome the artificially maintained duality between tradition-oriented spirituality and materialized pseudo-communal spiritualities.

Techniques to the Unknown explores the possibility of belief and existence beyond definable world religions, searching for the chance of a renewing, eternal sacrality. The exhibition seeks to raise questions about experiencing personal sacrality that transcends ideologies.

By employing both timeless and contemporary techniques (such as spray paint, ink, beadwork, metalwork, tufting, etc.), the artists carve a path toward the transcendental through the combined representation of industrial, applied art, fine art, formal, and functional limitations.

2023