Art and Culture
Italy
Hungarian Pavillion
by Alessia and Stephanie
FIRED BUT UNEXPODED
Each bomb has its own story, essentially
of two kinds. In the first, the bomb
explodes and executes its role as an
object made specifically for the purpose
of destruction, entering history books and
the personal histories that families
maintain. Zsolt Asztalos looks into the
other possible story in the installation he
has created for the 55th International Art
Exhibition in Venice: the story of the
malfunctioning device which stays with
us, generating, interpreting and
symbolizing conflicts among humans.
Turned out by the plough, hidden in the
depths of waters or found at construction
sites, in what semantic fields can these
objects, these relics of wars, these
carriers of a constant threat, be
interpreted? This is the question Asztalos
asks with an installation that conjures up
contemporary conflicts by combining
sixteen unexploded bombs with today’s
sounds and noises. Yet this is an
installation that explicitly tries to avoid a
strict interpretation, and the destructive
weapons together with the sounds have a
decidedly universal message of
humaneness, creating the possibility of a
new narrative. The unexploded bombs are
the manifestations of a state of grace, as
their technical dysfunction allows
personal and human history to be written
on. Their story is a real morality play, a
dance macabre; as a visual sign, the
destructive device creates an opportunity
for us to think about life, to reckon with
it.
The bombs turn into memorials, constant
warnings of the fact that they can
function as such only as unexploded
bombs; the fate of a functional, exploding
weapon is destruction as an object. The
unexploded bombs hover like mementos
in the indeterminate space, extending the
web of interpretation to a universal
dimension.
The other essential option for the story of
the bombs is dysfunction. These are
faulty products that show that the
innovative investments of a technological