Borderline Case
(Contemporary Reflections on Central-Eastern European Identity)

Curated by Tamás Don

At Modem, Debrecen, Hungary

January 22 — May 29, 2022

In some aspects Borderline Case is the continuation of the 2018 art exhibition “Time of our lives?”,which reviewed the works of emerging Hungarianartists. The exhibition puts on display the works of fourteen young artists from five countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Romania), most of which were made for this occasion. The title Borderline Case was inspired by the novel by Péter Hunčík, a psychiatrist of Hungarian origin who lives in Slovakia, presenting the 20th-century history of the region through the story of the inhabitants of a small Slovak border town with a mixed population. One the one hand, the term suggests that setting clear-cut boundaries has always been a crucialquestion in Central-Eastern Europe. On the other hand, it has always been hard to decide whether the region belongs to the West or to the East. The title was chosen specifically becauseit does not contain the slightly self-ironic stereotype that compares the region to the “West”.

Although the artists are members of a generation socialized in a globalized world,at the same time their lives are inevitably influenced by regionalism in the most different areas. The important question to ask is to what extent their identity is affectedby this and how itis reflected in their artworks.

Historian Gábor Egry contributed to the preparation of the exhibition by helpingto outline the historical context. The historical review interpreted Central-Eastern Europe in terms ofthree concepts:language, border, and the self-definition of the region.It was essential to point out those historical features which defined the region not only in the 20th century; therefore, the temporal focus of the historical examination was on the period between 1848 and 2021.

https://hypeandhyper.com/en/it-doesnt-matter-if-you-were-born-after-89-still-the-iron-playgrounds-shape-your-identity-interview-with-curator-tamas-don/?fbclid=IwAR3dAeeItyfDLh4ZLB9cc8t5Uur_CkJEfs66LT8xe5epUjBESq4hzQ_Tv-A

Today's harvest, 2021 

Jakub Choma’s presented series revolves around a dystopian discovery of an unknown matter which seems to be all around us, and yet remains trickily elusive. The main object of the series is an encapsulated shard, consisting of a UV print on a cork plate, which gives the impression of belonging to some much larger structure. Resting before us as a contained, isolated artefact, it seems to demand investigation, calling us to elaborate on it further until we begin to understand it. Looking at it closer, its shape even resembles a singular sort of a hand axe or an amulet – something that makes you feel you should keep it in your clenched fist. In its ambiguity, the shard brings to mind the incomparability of objects existing on radically different scales, a feeling we know all too well from the digital “immaterial” world of gaming, modeling, computing... Even the material of cork plate itself implies, on one hand, the idea of horizontality, ground-level, dirt, folksiness. But on the other, its grainy structure is also reminiscent of pixels, those often invisible but firm particles of digital image anatomy. And yet again, this graininess can at the same time resemble a "zoomed-in" organic structure – a porous skin, a body. It is a surface which, to some extent, can be said to have as much in common with human tissue as it does with a smartphone.

It is exactly because of this ambivalence that such speculative, unknown matter holds immense potential. Harvested from land, a city, or perhaps an online digital landscape, its awaited investigation might open some possibility for renewal, a new start. Connecting our own tissue to all different levels and scales, it could perhaps become the first sprout of an impending network: The primal shard, “the first brick”, the core cell of structures yet to come…