Artists: Ejtech & Melkovics Tamás
Exhibition title: Age Of String
Venue: Horizont Gallery, Budapest, Hungary
Date: April 17 – May 22, 2024
Photography: Dávid Biró / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Horizont Gallery, Budapest
The blades have survived the millennia, but the strings have rotten away. Stone hammers and bronze arrowheads patiently await to be excavated, yet the fundamental framework of string technology remains unacknowledged. A technology woven so profoundly into everyday life, that it seems to disappear completely. Prehistoric layers of time are defined by the increasing capability of humans to shape material into tools. What archeology has delineated as the Stone Age should be referred to as the String Age; the dawn of the ability of mankind to extend a hunters reach via ropes, to expand carrying capabilities of a gatherer with a pouch, to insulate the body from the weather with a cloth. The foundational cognitive skill of amalgamating two hard materials into a single tool by tying them together with a crafted soft material. The jumpstart of this complex process demonstrates ‘infinite use of finite means’, effectively weaving the fabric of civilization.
The return to unearthing this tacit knowledge and perceiving such concepts becomes a source for basing a contemporary spirituality and recalibrating social constructs. A possibility to discard an outdated, unbalanced belief system, and make way for fertile new mythologies.
Judit Eszter Kárpáti, Esteban de la Torre and Tamás Melkovics present a collaborative exhibition in the form of an augmented menhir, a uchronic multilayered environment, where matter is regarded as sentient and techno-spiritual ritualism blossoms from an underlying dynamic system.
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EJTECH is Judit Eszter Kárpáti and Esteban de la Torre. Their practice comprises hyperphysical interfaces and metamaterials investigating sensorial and conceptual interrelations, while blurring the differentiation between subject and object; rediscovering immanent soft grids of emerging structures. Driven by material research, resulting in performative installations, dynamic surfaces and multichannel sonic sculptures as an exploration of experiential knowledge through a deeper conversation with matter.
https://www.instagram.com/ejtech.cc
Tamás Melkovics’s starting point for art is play; a free way of thinking that is closely intertwined with the behavior and learning methods that define childhood. He works with a constantly contemplative, exploratory, open-minded attitude, using traditional sculptural foundations as a springboard. His sculptural tools are open, experimental. Personal expression and intuition play an essential role in the creation of Melkovics’s work. He creates his sculptures through emotions, feelings, technical questions and experiences. In his work, he attempts to dissolve the static, closed foundations of sculpture. He creates symbols, characters, groups of meaningful and abstract forms. From these elements, he builds, rearranges, dismantles and rebuilds compositions of varying scale, maintaining a kind of dialogue with our ever-changing physical world.
https://www.tamasmelkovics.com
https://www.instagram.com/tamas.melkovics
