Hessel Museum of Art (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)
April 6 – May 26, 2024
Artist: Lőrinc Borsos
“Lőrinc Borsos are neither one, nor two, neither husband nor wife, neither art nor anti-art. Rather, this name denotes the place where all of these movements and convulsions converge. We cannot know how many are inside the seething cauldron. They are legion.” —Márió Z. Nemes
NARNIA IS A LIE is the first institutional presentation in the US by Lőrinc Borsos—a Hungarian duo whose work has gained considerable influence in Central Europe since their inception fifteen years ago. A labyrinthine, atmospheric installation of multimedia sculptures overlaid with sound, kinetic, and light elements, NARNIA IS A LIE presents recent work that builds on the duo’s complex, private mythology—a mythology in dialogue with digital media, electronic music culture, video game aesthetics, and Christian iconography and eschatology.
In 2003, Lilla Lőrinc (b. 1980) and János Borsos (b. 1979) gave birth to their hybrid artistic identity, Lőrinc Borsos. Over the past fifteen years, their aesthetics and concerns have drawn inspiration from the duo’s various personal phases: beginning with the experience of spending eight years in a Christian religious sect and continuing with a turn to a politically engaged methodology. Followed by a self-analytical tone, their most recent works are marked by collective world-building strategies connected to video and role-playing games.
The postapocalyptic tone set up by NARNIA IS A LIE roots back to Lőrinc Borsos’s social work environment in Hungary, defined by Christian conservatism that has resulted in a constantly shrinking alternative artistic space. Drawing from this context, the duo’s exhibition invites visitors to a fictional future full of magical, religious, and power symbols cross-fertilized with motives of mysterious rites and techno culture. As if navigating a video game, the installation draws on the spiritual notion of transfiguration, utopian spaces, and imagined digital worlds. NARNIA IS A LIE also presents Lőrinc Borsos’s response to a 1987 sculpture by Jenny Holzer drawn from the Hessel Museum’s holdings.
Support for the exhibition is provided by the Esterházy Privatstiftung (Eisenstadt/Austria). Support for travel and accommodations is provided by BuBu Artist Residency.
Installation view from NARNIA IS A LIE, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, April 6 – May 26, 2024. Master’s thesis exhibition curated by Lili Rebeka Tóth. Photo: Olympia Shannon 2024.
