Elvis Presley park
22 September – 23 October 2023
Exhibiting artist:
Gideon Horváth
Collaborators:
FŐKERT Horticulture Division of Budapest Public Utilities Ltd., Hanzlik Műhely (Antal Kósa, József Kósa, László Pacza, Zoltán Sólyom), Lengyel Fémnyomó Műhely (Krisztián Meleg)
Non-heteronormative relationships are in the focus of Gideon Horváth’s work exhibited in Elvis Presley Park. With its beeswax sculptures installed in a hidden fountain as well as its accompanying events, Memory That Could Have Been is a monument to unfulfilled relationships, to unproclaimed and hushed loves. All this at a location that has been an important safe space for the subculture of gay cruising for decades. Gideon Horváth is interested in the various mechanisms of repression in mainstream society and its historical past. He points out a secluded site in the city that now becomes a reminder of the marginalised position of sexual minorities and their resulting resignation and vulnerability. In addition to the installation of a group of abstracted human figures in the fountain, the park comes to life several times through ‘secret’ events organised there. Based on unrealised personal memories of the participants, which become tangible via performative occasions, these events are organised by the artist himself. Otherness belongs to all of us, we have all felt like strangers or outsiders. The experience of the communities that deviate from the normative order is not a series of exotic stories that others cannot understand, but a set of basic human needs and desires that have never really been fulfilled over the course of the capital’s history of 150 years.
Photos: Balázs Kristóf