There has long been discourse on the end of art and art history, on the death or decline of art itself. But can the artist, too, be killed? Indeed – already dead. Barthes killed the author, just as Nietzsche pronounced the death of God. And yet, the author persists, the artist remains, and the Sunday bells still resonate. Creation and destruction are bound together: only that which can has the power to create can also erase.

The exhibition unfolds as a spatial crime scene, a conceptual whodunit where the observer becomes the investigator. Archival dossiers, fragmented installations, and fractured narrative traces point toward provisional answers. The gallery space becomes a site of death and rebirth: where the artist vanishes, the viewer encounters only phantoms.

But what is the artist? A human being? A brand? A creative fiction? How might this figure be traced across the tangled and splintered terrains of pop culture, high art, the internet, and social media? The artist, as a role, has dissolved into an abstraction shaped by the logics of algorithms and the economies of visibility. Death, as an exponential catalyst, fixes the artist’s position within the marketplace. The artist as fiction converges with the present crises of human existence itself. And perhaps the artist is also their own assassin? Self-destruction may at once be an attempt at liberation and an act of resistance against the system. Here, “death” is not an ending but a transformation: the abandonment of labels, positions, identities.

Part of the exhibition offers a voyeuristic glimpse into the everyday life of the artist, where fleeting intimacies are juxtaposed with the image of the estranged, preserved figure. The question of who the killer might be, or whether such a killer exists at all, remains for the viewer to resolve. Here, the catalogue prepared for the exhibition provides an additional layer of guidance, appearing in the space as a collaborative act by Pataki and the invited contributors (artists and art historians).

Ultimately, this may be read as an experiment in extricating oneself from the confines of local time and space, projecting yet another unit of fiction, and creating a shared surface precisely where none exists.

PUBLICATION WITH WORKS AND TEXT FROM:
Zsófia Antalka, Paul Barsch, Barnabás Bácsi, Robin Goldbach, Lena Horn, Orshi Horváth, Júlia Kerekes, Olga Kocsi, Botond Keresztesi, Ágnes Keszegh, Virginia Lorenzetti, Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss, Tímea Pók, Sandro Prodonovic, Márk Rékai, Lydia Smith, Patrick Tayler, Andrea Szilák, Zoltán Visnyai, Georg Winter

Curator: Ágnes Keszegh

Opening hours: Wed-Thurs-Fri: 4-7 PM