Invitation to the inauguration of the Hungarian Pavilion

[anna balint]

INVITATION

Hungarian Pavilion, 50th International Exhibition of Art
The Body of Nefertiti - Little Warsaw in Venice
(Please find the presentation attached)

Inauguration
on the 13th of June 2003 at 4.15 p.m.
Giardini della Biennale
by the Minister of Culture Mr. István Hiller

Exhibiting artists: András Gálik and Bálint Havas (Little Warsaw)
National Commissioner: Dr. Júlia Fabényi
Curator: Dr. Zsolt Petrányi (mobile in Venice: +39 33 871 865 49)
Project manager: Barnabás Bencsik
Assistant: András Gulyás
Communication: Györgyi Falvai (mobile: +36 209 289870)
Documentation: Lenke Szilágyi

M?csarnok/Kunsthalle, Budapest - Biennale Office
H-1146 Budapest, Dózsa György út 37. Tel/fax: +361 460 7030
Contact: Györgyi Falvai +36 209 28 98 70
biennaleoffice at mucsarnok.hu

www.pavilon2003.hu


The Body of Nefertiti - Little Warsaw in Venice

The artists to represent Hungary at the 50th Venice Biennale are András Gálik 
and Bálint Havas, or as they call their cooperation, of seven years standing 
now, Little Warsaw. They concentrate on sculpture, for which they build an 
independent artistic scene, spiritual and physical space.
The project to be shown in the Hungarian Pavilion, The Body of Nefertiti, is an 
international process, which occupies all the time available for preparation 
for the Biennale. The purpose of the project is to create a body for the well-
known portrait of Nefertiti, kept in Berlin, and to put together the body and 
the head. The point is to position the original bust in a new system of 
relations, thanks to which a key element of the project is communication with 
the Egyiptisches Museum, Berlin, the keeper of the bust. Thanks to 
negotiations, in early May the spiritual and physical encounter between the 
body sculpted by Little Warsaw and what is perhaps the best-known portrait in 
the world history of art took place in the exhibition hall of the Berlin 
museum.
The exhibition of Little Warsaw in the Hungarian Pavilion of the Venice 
Biennale focus on a single work, the body of Nefertiti, a symbol in its own 
right. The film documentation of the "meeting" of the two artworks shoot in the 
Egyptisches Museum, Berlin is also presented as part of the show to describe 
all the layers of meanings the body, the head and the momentary performance 
brings together.
 
Zsolt Petrányi
curator of the show


Hungarian Pavilion, 50th International Exhibition of Art
The Body of Nefertiti - Little Warsaw in Venice

Inauguration
on the 13th of June 2003 at 4.15 p.m.
Giardini della Biennale
by the Minister of Culture Mr. István Hiller

Exhibiting artists: András Gálik and Bálint Havas (Little Warsaw)
National Commissioner: Dr. Júlia Fabényi
Curator: Dr. Zsolt Petrányi
Project manager: Barnabás Bencsik
Assistant: András Gulyás
Communication: Györgyi Falvai
Documentation: Lenke Szilágyi

M?csarnok/Kunsthalle, Budapest - Biennale Office
H-1146 Budapest, Dózsa György út 37. Tel/fax: +361 460 7030
Contact: Györgyi Falvai +36 209 28 98 70
biennaleoffice at mucsarnok.hu	

www.pavilon2003.hu

The Body of Nefertiti Concept

1. Egypt and the Cultural Tradition
Although in Laws Plato considered Egypt the cradle of uncorrupted culture, the 
archetype of his own ideal state, Hellenistic and late antique culture, in 
which local traditions blended with the cultural forms of the conquerors, first 
of Alexander the Great and then of the Romans, even the traces of the nostalgia 
for continuity and a respect for old civilizations were wiped out. Egypt was a 
mystery and remained one. Contemporary artists struggling with the artistic 
tradition - and the history of European art is also a history of struggling 
with the tradition - never used it as a model or source, as they did use Greek 
or Roman antiquity. Egyptian culture was incomprehensible for European culture 
until archaeologists who looked upon the past not with the eyes of the artist 
but with those of the scholar “decoded” it. Even today, an artwork from Egypt 
is first considered an ancient find, an antique object, something from a time 
before our history, and only then a work of art.
Even so, Nefertiti’s bust has had a curious career. The antique transmuted into 
a work of art, and a famous one at that, the best-known example of Egyptian 
art. It also became famous as a pure form of beauty, to live on - like so many 
other icons of ideal beauty - in the form of copies, jewellery, postcards, the 
tourists’ memories, even as an advertising figure. Today Nefertiti is a 
cultural star, the bust had come overt time to be overshadowed by the assumed 
ideal beauty and the assumed important personage.
Creating Nefertiti’s body thus makes us, first and foremost, confront our 
complex relation to tradition or traditions, whether Egyptian culture is 
presented by professionals  in professional exhibitions, or pinned to the flag 
of those contesting the arrogance of European culture - like pro-
multiculturalism movements in the Unites States and of course in Egypt -, or 
introduced as a romantic and exotic world, long past, as in period films or 
historical novels.

2. A Portrait of a Woman
In European art the female body seldom has a personality. Portraits have faces, 
and rarely bodies - female portraits hardly ever display individual, powerful 
gestures, singularly shaped peculiar bodies. The female body is stylized even 
when it bears the head of a portrait. Whenever the body happens to be 
forcefully individual, it is the face that is blurred into some sort of 
generality.
Which makes it a considerable task to create a body for a female bust. In 
Nefertiti’s case the job is of course even more complicated. For one thing, 
there is extant a representation of the queen which shows more than the bust, 
and this body, in line with the relatively - sometimes even shockingly - 
realistic endeavours of the artists of the Akhenaton period, has none of the 
idealized beauty with which modern mass culture has invested the bust.
Yet this dilemma is of secondary importance when compared to that of how to 
make a full-length portrait when the model is not available, and when the 
world, the cultural norms of the original representation are to a great extent 
unknown, are most probably different from the traditions we know and employ.
Creating a female body for an existing head certainly calls for radical 
aesthetic and ethical decisions. How can such a body be a work of contemporary 
art and be authentic? Can you consider a body, presented at a contemporary art 
exhibition, a work of art, when its head is essentially an archaeological find, 
which has nevertheless turned into a cultural icon, a “star,” and is normally 
presented in its museum in an exhibition space that is as neutral as possible? 
What does it mean to approach the personality of the subject with humility, as 
is required by a portrait, when the personality itself is half mythic, its life 
insufficiently known? Can a sculpture be a portrait when it is by necessity 
without humility towards the personality (since the personality is 
unavailable)? What can be used, and how, to recreate this personality, so that 
the body and the head, despite their different origins and contexts, function 
together as the portrait of a woman?

3. Liberating the work of art
Museums, exhibition halls, galleries, fairs, the international art and antique 
market, art criticism, art history, archaeology and anthropology, the frames of 
reference in which art, diplomacy and economics are interpreted: these 
civilizational phenomena today seem perspectives and institutions that call for 
a careful distinction, that form a heterogeneous complex. Yet this functional 
segregation is neither natural nor well-established in a historical 
perspective.
The system of art institutions has maintained, and goes on to maintain, the 
conditions of the mid-19th century, when art was strictly distinguished from 
all other spheres, and was itself divided between “the temple” and “the 
bazaar.” “The temple,” typified by museums, galleries, fenced-off sculptures in 
public spaces and buildings converted to museums, is a place for piety, 
contemplation, cultured reception, a place out of this world. “The bazaar” is 
the market where aesthetic qualities and norms have no function: what matters 
is individual choice, taste, fashion and prices.
The artists who do not wish to move into either the temple or the bazaar, or 
who do not want to distinguish between them, are expelled to a no man’s land, 
and recent years saw more and more attempts at making this territory 
noticeable. A way out is positioning works of art in public spaces, in media 
that normally serve other messages: advertising surfaces in public 
transportation, bridges and billboards. It seems, however, that the intended 
audience filters out art/poetry taken out to the street, reacts to it as 
something difficult to understand or constituting unnecessary information: 
these works are sad defeats in subways and trams, registered only by 
professionals journals send out to document the enterprise.
There have been other attempts to break out of the confining and increasingly 
alien frame of the institutions: artists sometimes mobilized entire communities 
and audiences, social forces, supporters (and consequently opponents), to 
produce their work - Christo being probably the best example, when his wrapping 
of the Reichstag provoked responses from the entire German political elite, as 
well as the media and the public.
Moving what is called an “invaluable” object, whose diplomatic status is at the 
same time ambiguous, through national borders, by people who are not the 
citizens of either the source or the target country, nor for that matter of the 
land where it was recovered, is a massive international endeavour. And in this 
respect it is not different from any other, business, diplomatic, legal, 
political, private, official or semi-official endeavours: it involves 
approaching and convincing German, Italian and Hungarian government agencies, 
archaologists, museum professionals, journalists, curators, property management 
agencies, constructors, insurance companies (etc!). Consequently the work - 
considered as a process and not simply the palpable end-product - will be, if 
not a manipulator, certainly a catalyst and litmus test of a great number of 
complex relations which involve, to various degrees and in various ways, 
millions of people.

4. And the miracle (in a personal tone)
And the miracle is happening, right before our eyes: all those decision-makers 
who are shaping these relations, assure, one after the other, our artists of 
their willingness to cooperate: Dietrich Wildung, director of the Ägyptisches 
Museum und Papyrussammlung, Berlin, whose considerable responsibility it is to 
keep and look after the Nefertitni bust, the Egyptian government authorities 
and Egyptologists (for whom Nefertiti is a source of both pride and resentment, 
as Egypt demands it back), Hungarian government authorities, the property 
management agency that lent Divatcsarnok [an unused department store in 
downtown Budapest] for the purposes of preparing for and documenting the 
exhibition. An extremely exciting story is well under way, which initially 
seemed completely absurd and unlikely.
In a word, the project has started moving. Now the body needs to be born, a 
female body, which the chronicler of the Nefertiti Project looks forward to 
with a mixture of fear and trembling curiosity not so much as an art historian, 
writer or contemplating being, but as a flesh-and-blood woman.

Eszter Babarczy
historian of ideas














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