ARTIST STATEMENT

Artist Statement

My body of works look at “the last utopic moment” from the perspective of today’s dystopic, uncertain present, characterized by digital alienation. In my own memories, the last utopic, global moment can be traced back to the early 1990s after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The atmosphere of the era can be captured when scanning through its layers of alternative culture, namely the presence and effects of techno and electronic music. What remains of these sub-/countercultural, revolutionary movements, is captured within damaged, entropic, low-resolution digital images and videos of that time.

My works react to these attitudes, combining the tools provided by digital and analogue technology. The original images serve as the basis for meta-collages, which are in ltrated with typographies, logosand contemporary visual symbols representative of the uncertain, increasingly dystopian techno-present. Bringing forth inherent links between Xerox photocopying and the punk subculture; DIY desktop publishing, offset print, CTP-technology, 3D animation and early techno culture. Domestic desktop computers became widely available in the 90s, a development that is closely connected to the visual language of rave culture. This was accompanied by new technologies in offset printing, which facilitated the heterogeneousvisual identity of club yers or posters. As punk relied on Xerox, thesame relationship can be said about techno subcultures and early graphic editing software (Macromedia Freehand, Coreldraw, a.o.), personal computers and the developing offset printing industry.

The ongoing projects also builds on the important events of techno culture in order to expose and possibly escape from the polished world of consumerism as well as to reveal its media-archaeological implictions. As an additional juxtaposition, the utopic architectural visions of the 50s/60s (mid-century modernism) appear alongside the optimist moments of the early 90s. The used visual elements are enlarged images (found footage), zoomed-in, highlighting geology, stratification, and the act of ‘digging’ through media. Similar tothe effect of the slow vertical movement of a microscope, we see a disintegrated (entropic) pixel landscape with the image becoming more and more focused on a detail as it narrows.

As the Budapest-based theorist Zsolt Miklósvölgyi recently summarized, “Mark Fridvalszki’s  works are primarily focusing on the sensual materiality of failed modernist visions. His artistic program can be described as archeo-futurological, since his collages, paintings, and prints are cultural sediments of our lost collective futurities. This reverse archeology as an artistic program also results in a spectropoetic approach that deals with haunting utopist fantasies of various future pasts. Therefore, visual art and hauntology are becoming mutual metonyms of each other on multiple scales: from psychedelic landscapes to the cosmic proportions of planetary perspectives.”

​Web: http://markfridvalszki.com
T+U: http://technologieunddasunheimliche.com

SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/markfridvalszki

BIOGRAPHY

Mark Fridvalszki (1981 in Budapest, lives in Berlin) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2011 and was a post-graduate 'Meisterschüler' student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig (2014 - 2017). Fridvalszki is the co-initiator and graphic editor of the publishing project and cross-discipinary movement Technologie und das Unheimliche (T+U, since 2014).

Mark Fridvalszki participated in various exhibitions and art events, such as Horizont Gallery Budapest (2019, 2020), TIC Gallery Brno (2020), Karlin Studios Prague (2019), Ludwig Museum Budapest (2019), Hungarian National Gallery (2019), Miart (2019), Paris Internationale (2018), Modem in Debrecen (2018), D21 Kunstverein in Leipzig (2018), Vienna Contemporary (2017, 2016), Meetfactory Gallery Prague (2016), Trafó Gallery Budapest (2016), Chimera Projects in Budapest (2016), Vorspiel Transmediale Berlin 2016 (T+U, 2016), Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart (T+U, 2015), Kisterem Gallery (2015), Lehrter 17 Berlin (2015), and residency in Futura Prague (2019), Schafhof Freising (2018), Meetfactory (2015) among many others.