How shall we face the desert; the heat covering everything, the vast amount of stones, the future? András Cséfalvay does not look for answers or the illusion of sollution, instead, he juxtaposes different world views and forms of knowledge emanating immutability, which are capable of showing the same questions and so-called ‘facts’ from totally different perspectives.

In his videos he gives voice to all those overshadowed, forgotten or silenced sounds that are relegated to the background in narratives characteristic of our rational world view. Sounds that no longer exist, extinct animals, dinosaurs, stones and ambassadors of distant planets become audible. There manifest the error, the hypothesis, the reason and the irrational, the scientific and the magical thinking. In his video installations different spiritual and scientific views clash and play off one against the other again and again. Such a confrontation of distinct world views, models that interpret, systematize and organize the reality, as well as scientific ideas that contradict one another sheds light on the decision processes, hierarchical relations, power aspects and individual, community or even national interests lying in the background of (scientific) facts. The facts are not tools that make possible the understanding of a total truth, since the assumption that this single truth – if there is one of this sort – would be accessible for us is both useless and arrogant.

Cséfalvay freely selects within our image of reality placed among the coordinates of rules and rational systems, according to which ‘truth’ proves to be the most useful in the given situation. He searches the relevant place of the possibility of breaking the rules, of altering the facts in any moment, of mysticism and the inexplicable, and examines whether we can hear what the desert proposes to us, whether we are capable of changing our viewpoint, even if failure is inevitable.

Borbála Szalai

András Cséfalvay (1986) lives and works in Bratislava. Following his studies in mathematics and painting he obtained a doctoral degree at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. In 2009 he was the winner of the Oskar Čepan Award.
He works with a wide array of media, usually with the aim of bending reality to unexpected angles, whilst something new can be discovered.
http://www.andrascsefalvay.com