ARTIST PROFILE

Kitti Gosztola

  • Hungary (b. 1986 in Székesfehérvár)
  • Currently in Budapest, Hungary.

REPRESENTATION

  • 2017

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  • Grain of Salt - thumbnail Buffet Gauss – Hungarian to Go: Divorce on the Beach  - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail Grids over Waves - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail Naming You - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail Eye-Rhymes - thumbnail  - thumbnail The Compass - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail  - thumbnail

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    Grain of Salt (with Olivér Horváth and Szilvi Német) | 2017

The last uncharted domain, the realm of the seas had largely been colonized by the lines of geography and communication and fully encircled by the institutions of war and science by the time Hungary entered the race. With hardly any links beyond the myth of a Hungary once surrounded by three seas and a scene of the poet-count Zrínyi/Zrinski sailing on the cover of his “Siren of the Adriatic”, Hungary’s relation to the sea was both ambiguous and ambitious. ~~~~~~~ With all the marine aspirations in diplomacy and science, literature and cuisine condensed in one single point, Rijeka, the “Fiume shark” still remained a synonym of fake news in a mainland Hungary dreaming about dominating the seas. Before all relations – Fiume & Croatia, Croatia & Hungary, Hungary & the Dual Monarchy – exploded, Croatian and Hungarian scientists had found time to cross each other’s lines more subtly with contradicting grids of the Adriatic Sea segments investigated. ~~~~~~~ But like some organisms disperse when taken out of the sea, some ideas elude delineation. Some consonances, called eye-rhymes in poetry, only work until you look at the lines – when you pronounce them, harmony is gone. ~~~~~~~ Conversely, some ideas only float around ambiguously until being written down. While you sing a lullaby about the Sea Lion Woman the audience may hear a dark ballad of See-line Woman; one of those lined up in the port, luring the sailors into their doom. Like the Siren of the Adriatic, where it remains unknown, whether the poet is the tempter or the tempted. But what remains when your very notion of the sea starts to fade and you enter Sealessness? ~~~~~~~ As resentment over the lost lands and population developed into a debilitating monomania in interwar Hungary, it was the topos of the Mountain that came to symbolize the loss, in terms of symbols and phrases. Yearning for the sea was unrealistic enough to remain detached and elegiac, ranging from the harmless to the bizarre, practiced by the members of a small cult. Sailing the sea within, the publication of A Tenger (The Sea) journal unwavered until 1944, declaring that having at least the tiniest sea access is a mental necessity for all nations. ~~~~~~~ Grain of Salt is a one-breath dive into Sealessness, the marine fantasies without a sea in science and art, a dive into a sea of facts, myths, constellations, broken lines and rhymes that don’t add up.