ARTIST PROFILE

Rebeka Sára Szigethy

  • Hungary (b. 1983 in Budapest)
  • Currently in Folkestone, United Kingdom.

CONTACT & LINKS

VII. - 51.238131, 1.137654

VII. - 51.238131, 1.137654

  • 2019
  • Screen Print, Monotype
  • 21 x 30 cm

  • Enso made while riding bus 1A, 16 and 10 between my workplace in Ashford, university campus in Canterbury and my home in Folkestone. Coordinates added to the finished monotypes mark the exact locations where the original drawings were made.
  • Documenting Failure - thumbnail XV. - 51.274094, 1.088988 - thumbnail XIV. - 51.083427, 1.162281 - thumbnail I. - 51094888, 1.180126 - thumbnail IV. - 51.084867, 1.152470 - thumbnail  - thumbnail XII. - 51.088566, 1.065170 - thumbnail IX. - 51.225514, 1.150314 - thumbnail V. - 51.245653, 1.125874 - thumbnail III. - 51.123180, 0.973724 - thumbnail VIII. - 51.159698, 0.8901183 - thumbnail II. - 51.084591, 1.154695 - thumbnail XI. - 51.097799, 1.176607 - thumbnail VII. - 51.238131, 1.137654 - thumbnail X. - 51.076919, 1.155464 - thumbnail XIII. - 51.105506, 1.171371 - thumbnail

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    Documenting Failure / Hiba | 2019

Intention is ineffable and unattainable. While engaging in any action, we are unwillingly and unknowingly exposed to the circumstances, which continuously re-channel our acts without allowing us to consider the infinite number of factors that facilitate this re-channeling. Knowing of a less-than-infinite number of factors is the same as not knowing of any. The result of the act can only approximate the original intention: intention is located in the cross-section of results. Documenting Failure poses many questions. To what extent is it one’s duty as an artist to maintain control over their own work, if at all? And if it is, then where and how can one maintain and regain it? In what way does the selection of certain results of repetitions and attempts determine the image of the final work? To what extent may one yield to error? The project Documenting Failure is a way of letting go of the anxiety over losing control over the act by shifting control over into documenting instead of into attempts at approaching outcomes to intentions, that is, by accepting error, and even making it an organic part of the work. An important visual and philosophical inspiration for Documenting Failure is the Zen Buddhist practice of drawing ensō, a circle usually executed in ink with a single, swift brushstroke. Considering it “a direct expression of thusness or this-moment-as-it-is”1 implies an infinite number of circumstances affecting the process of approaching intention to outcome, that is, the process of drawing the circle in a given moment in time and space. Implying that which is unknowable is of marked importance in my work, which draws a parallel with On Kawara’s series Today and I Got Up. Kawara’s conceptual works are authentic statements about the world, yet the information they contain is so condensed that the reality beyond them is rendered completely inaccessible. Documenting Failure signifies the inaccessibility and ineffability of a moment’s totality in a way that is similar to Ollie Gapper’s treatment of photography in his 2016 project Radius of Action: in his view, photography “necessarily fractures space and time to distil scenes into a two-dimensional, stationary rendering of a scene which is precisely the opposite of that.” In this sense, photography constitutes a loss of information about reality, which I emphasise in my work through the use of the screen printing technique.