Catalogue > At random

Eszter Katalin

Mária Vörösben

Vidéo expérimentale | hdcam | couleur | 28:39 | Hongrie, Autriche | 2018

A woman visits a prison in the village of Márianosztra (Hungary) to find out more about the ongoing production of barbed wire by the inmates of the institution for various European border fences. Subsequently, she engages in a research about those women who were imprisoned there for being communists and antifascists between 1920 and 1944 at a time when it was run by nuns as a place to "re-discipline" the sentenced person through labor and prayer. The voice of a ghost belonging to a female political prisoner follows her as she is trying to connect past and present through gestures of mourning.

Eszter Katalin (born 1991, Budapest) is an artist based in Vienna. She has recently finished her master`s degree in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2015-2018). In her works she focuses on the tensions between political struggles and their representation within a so-called critical artistic practice, departing frequently, but not solely, from Hungary’s social context as marked through its politics of memory and exclusion. Her latest works include her film MEGSZAKÍTÁS* Civil Aktivizmus Magyarországon (MEGSZAKÍTÁS* Civil Activism in Hungary, video in four parts, 76 min, 2017), Versammlung (Coming together, audio piece, 9 min, 2017) and Mária Vörösben (Mary in Red, video, 28:39 min, 2018).