Zsolt Asztalos | Memory Models

MEMORY AND THE MUSEUM

The exhibition Memory Models, presented in the nave of the Museum Kiscell – Municipal Gallery, places individual memory in the spotlight. Zsolt Asztalos’ art project, drawing on the findings of cognitive psychological research, explores questions of the past, memory, personal history, and constructed mnemonic narratives. Since the second half of the 20th century, research and discourse on personal and collective memory have played an increasingly important role in museum practices.

If we consider the museum as a lieu de mémoire (site of memory) in Pierre Nora’s sense—an institutionally framed space ensuring continuity between past and present—then reflections on both former and current artistic, social, and political relations are of equal importance to the museum’s mission. In recent years, the Municipal Gallery’s exhibition program has often sought to create critical dialogue between past and present. The curators and art historians involved in exhibition-making did not only present pieces from the collection based on (art-)historical considerations; in collaboration with contemporary artists, they recontextualized works, raised questions, and created new interpretive frameworks.

This exhibition continues that line of inquiry and, we hope, connects to projects in the coming years, as the museum’s presentation of memory and the past will remain closely linked to contemporary art. However, this concept approaches the subject from a different angle: its points of reference are the latest findings in memory research. The essentially numerical results of cognitive psychology, transformed into images through data visualization techniques (such as MRI scans) or rendered into text in scientific summaries, become—through another interpretive process—the raw material for artistic creation, resulting in tangible and evocative objects and images. From the interplay between science and artistic interpretation emerge visual models that both reveal the constructed nature of private memory and, by incorporating them into the museum’s mnemonic space, point to questions of collective memory.

In the coming years, the Museum Kiscell – Municipal Gallery will continue working along this trajectory, planning in 2022 a major exhibition on the history and present of public sculpture, monuments, forgetting, silence, and communal memory as part of the project The Memory of Women Raped in War.

MEMORY MODELS – EXHIBITION BY ZSOLT ASZTALOS

In recent years, Zsolt Asztalos’ artistic practice has been defined by the themes of history, the past, memory, and forgetting. His works reflect a postmodern conception of history and past experience that emphasizes the relativity of historical narratives and confronts us with the limits of capturing personal memory. Rather than examining history as institutionalized memory, Asztalos focuses on local or partial narratives—yet he does not identify or clearly define them. Instead, he uses visual means to draw attention to the ineffable nature of memories and the question of their visual representation.

While many disciplines—including the now independent field of memory studies—address collective memory and the historical formation of narratives, cognitive psychology has achieved significant results in studying individual memory and uncovering the processes that take place in the brain. Western visual art and philosophical thought have been profoundly influenced by Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896). His ideas—alongside those of Freud and Jung—also inspired literature (Proust) and visual art (informel, Tàpies), attributing a formative role to memory and emphasizing that no perception exists that is not shaped by our memories. Although Bergson’s view that memory is purely mental and cannot be traced in matter appears to be contradicted by contemporary scientific findings, his thesis—distinguishing free memory from material mechanisms—stimulated the humanities. Bergson’s key concept later became duration (durée), which is heterogeneous, subjective, and immeasurable (as opposed to physical, homogeneous, measurable time) and can only be grasped through intuition.

In his video series Memory, Asztalos conducted “silent interviews,” asking participants to recall significant events from their lives. These memories are never verbalized: viewers see only the participants’ faces and surroundings, while ambient sounds and noises hint at the passing of time. In Bergsonian terms, what becomes perceptible is subjective, heterogeneous time—the duration in which the past flows into the present. Because of this unique temporal experience inherent in remembering, the “representation” of time is unavoidable in Asztalos’ project. Beyond that, the artist explores what kind of visuality memory possesses: can a hidden story be captured through external human features? The absence of storytelling and verbalization activates situations of experiencing and silencing, living through and repression, in these short, still moments recorded in intimate settings.

The other part of the exhibition, located in the nave, is the installation Memory Models, consisting of 45 objects, photographs, object ensembles, and models placed on small tables of varying heights. Alongside these models are excerpts of scientific texts explaining how human memory functions. In this installation, Asztalos emphasizes the alienating and distancing character of the scientific language of memory research as opposed to lived emotions, rendering abstract concepts and scientific models through constructions reminiscent of architectural maquettes. The problem of the relationship between individual memory and scientific modeling thus leads—more broadly—to the question of verbal and visual expressibility.

The exhibition concludes with an interview with psychologist Anett Ragó, offering insight into the history and present state of scientific research on memory.