Per Visibilia ad invisibilia (Semmelweis klinika)

In my artistic practice, I explore the rupture between image and reality — a fragile boundary that becomes especially acute in the age of digital imagery. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), I am interested in the notion of the “false” image — one that not only represents truth but also generates its own imagined realities. Deleuze distinguishes between two types of falsehood: the classical — as deception and manipulation, and the modern — where different layers of time and perspective intertwine, making it impossible to separate truth from fiction.

These ideas resonate with my personal observations, particularly in the context of war. In the project Per visibilia ad invisibilia, I worked with a video performance in which artificial plastic flowers intruded into the natural landscape. Within the exhibition space, viewers could also observe a light table with a photograph of a flower field and attempt to distinguish real flowers from decorative imitations. For me, this became a metaphor of the information war: disinformation, like a plastic replica of nature, may eventually displace the real. In this way, I sought to emphasize the importance of distinguishing reality from myths, which circulate even within professional circles — sometimes consciously, sometimes not.

Since 2011, I have also been experimenting with casting forms from any material at hand. Baroque reliefs of the 18th century became layered over cattle skulls smuggled at night from an abandoned meat plant; together with Anton Varga, we boiled them over a fire in the park and treated them with lime to erase the last traces of flesh. In my Uzhhorod studio, plaster busts of ancient heroes grew grotesque Pinocchio-like noses; dead crows left their imprints, broken toys became fragments of memory, and fresh casts of friends’ and visitors’ faces joined this peculiar collection. Papier-mâché masks stitched together the unmatchable, creating forms without an obvious meaning, whose strength lay in the fact that each viewer invented their own myth around these objects.

Thus, my art unfolds in the space between reality and fiction, between the material and the symbolic, raising the question: how does contemporary visual culture shape our perception of truth, and how, within this flow of layered signs and images, a new collective memory is constructed?