Michal Czinege
You Were Never Really Here
2–25 April 2021
Galleria Huuto is open on Easter!
On Good Friday 2nd of April 2021, on Saturday 3rd of April and on Easter Sunday 4th of April the gallery is open as usual 12-5 pm.
I like to think of the objects in “You were never really here” as shards or shells of beings. They are long gone, their souls perished, and a mere memory remains on the surface of the shells. A memory that glides on a surface, oscillates, pulsates and casts back as an afterglow. Rather than a bridge between what was and what is, this ‘memory’ doesn’t so much signify a recollection of what once happened in times past. Instead, it is a cue to an irrevocably ongoing happening of indeterminate states, events and processes. It’s a cue to consider what is happening before our eyes and what takes place only in our minds. A constantly sounding question, ‘Was I ever really here?’ What does it mean, can I prove it?
The installation is loosely connected to the book “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” by H. Murakami. Empirical evidence and quotidian observations are called into question. “You were never really here” is a play of the perceptible, and its objects are but light touches on how human perception relates to an incessantly changing reality we inhabit. A sense of incompleteness permeates the installation; it’s as if someone had just started dismantling it. I’d like to leave an imprint of an indefinite process, duration, something that leads to no linear ending.
Seemingly stable in substance yet strangely fluid on the surface, the objects are made of thin, flat metal sheets. They get their shapes from being bent, pressed and depressed by hand and the weight of my body. To mould them I used as few tools as possible, aiming to closely examine the materials and at the same time render their rigid, supposedly inert materiality into something of fragile substance.
*Michal Czinege is a Slovak-born artist based in Finland. He earned his doctorate degree in arts from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where he worked as assistant professor at the Painting Dept. until moving to Finland in 2016. Czinege’s work has been exhibited internationally at numerous venues, such as the Slovak National Gallery, Q21 at Museumsquartier in Vienna and most recently Joensuu Art Museum and MUU Helsinki.
The exhibition has been supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland and the city of Nurmes.
