2B Galéria és Alma on Dobbin az Art Marketen

CHIM’S Children of War

In the Spring of 1948, UNICEF commissioned Chim as a ‘special consultant’ to photograph the condition of European children who had survived World War II, and to show UNICEF in as it provided 13 million children with bare necessities such as powdered milk, soup and shoes, as well as vaccinations against tuberculosis and other diseases.

The UNICEF assignment soon became a labor of love as Chim traveled to five countries (Austria, Greece, Hungary, Italy and Poland). The abandoned children had spent their first years in underground shelters, bombes streets, ghettos, refugee trains and concentration camps.

The proposed exhibition will assemble forty-five to fifty 11×14’’ specially printed images, some of them never seen before, of the work Chim did in Hungary and in Poland, with three quarters of the show dedicated to Hungary. He photographed children as young as four or five years old, and as old as seventeen, in a variety of settings: hospitals and orphanages, prisons and camps, schools and farms, dormitories, workshops, factories and fields.

Chim’s photographs, as presented in this show, are his family album. This spiritual family will remain his only one: the man who loved children would never have any of his own. He went well beyond illustrating UNICEF’s work and has succeeded in creating a deeper, broader portrait of the children. Carole Naggar, Writer and Curator

NAGY JÓZSEF (JOSEPH NAGY)

Joseph Nadj’s history with photography differs from his path concerning the totality of other arts, in that he began to explore photographic media only in 1989, continuing his work without interruption ever since. Among his photographic works, conceived in cycles or series, are notably L’Opus de Saratov, Les Jours, Dans l’atelier de Miquel Barceló, Paragrammes, Les Photogrammes, Cyanotypes. These blueish ‘photos’ have not been common for over a century, as modern photographic techniques overtook them. These pictures is a both a return to this old style and a return to nature, with many grasses and leaves as subjects.

SUSANNA SCHOENBERG, KAETHE WENZEL and CLAUDIA SCHMITZ present a triple project on migration and interior surveillance. While Schmitz depicts the ambiguous situation in the Mediterranean where vacation and existential crisis happen side by side, Wenzel deals with the issues of arrival and making a new life in a new place. Schoenberg focuses on surveillance and security, which are a crucial part of the discussion about immigration and refugees. All three consider everyday life as the adequate context for a discussion of the burning issues of refugee crisis, calls for security, and migration. This is why they choose the street and the context of the city as site for their temporary interventions. They are always new, re-invented in different contexts and in dialogue with citizens, shaped by the city they are taking place in, by the reactions, architecture, and societal climate. Besides Budapest, the individual projects have traveled, or will travel, to New York, Berlin, Milan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and others, resulting in a global survey of experiences and reactions to internal security, chosen cultural identity, and migration.
When Hungary – as one of the first European states – started to take drastic measures against refugees, we were extremely impressed by 2B Galería‘s immediate reaction. The heated discussion- which by now far extends Hungary – and the specific historical situation of Hungary is part of our interventions in Budapest.

The projects: FUTURE M, IN BETWEEN, and MONITORING PRE-HUMAN

For FUTURE M Wenzel asks questions. She talks to people from different backgrounds and generations about why they choose to live in the city of their choice rather than the more frequent query, ‘Where do you come from (and when are you going back)?’ She develops sketches she made during the interviews into animated drawings, which she combines with street art and the internet. Interview quotations and drawings become part of an interactive map of the world, opening a many-voiced panorama on the reasons and results of migration. The map can be accessed on www.cartoonorama.de or via QR-Codes from the streets of New York.

For IN BETWEEN Schmitz reactivates waste by recycling found plastic bags into wind-activated sculptures. Installed in the city landscape, they serve as three-dimensional, moving screens for her video-projections. IN BETWEEN shows images from the Mediterranean, creating simultaneous impressions of leisure and drowning, referencing the current refugee crisis in Europe: asking questions about privilege, waste, the sharing of riches, racism, and the hugely differing price of human life.
Claudia Schmitz’ interventions can be found at www.cces-claudiaschmitz.de/projects/interventionen/nyc
and via QR-Code in the cities New York, Berlin, Chemnitz and Budapest

MONITORING PRE-HUMAN is an for the public (or semi-public) space. The exercise deploys mirror objects as devices capable to catch pictures in a space used by the public while being monitored by privatized authorities, in order to display them to the public. The limits of visibility (when am I part of the picture) and the accessibility of the picture (who does have access to my picture) are substantial aspect of the action: being hold beside a surveillance camera the mirror can be used by the passersby for comprehending their being in the picture of an otherwise displaced displaying. At the same time »MONITORING PRE-HUMAN« can be seen as a sculptural intervention, temporarily building a public monitoring system and involving passersby as performers giving new structures to the space.
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