Little Warsaw
Jaali - Horizontal
Jaali – Horizontal references religious practices in Hungary that were considered civil disobedience throughout the 1950s. In their text associated with the work, Little Warsaw state: “My ancestors on my father’s side were rather elegant Hungarian noblemen—lots of churches, lots of religious education. My parents went to church as a form of civil resistance. Later, when it was all right to do so, they didn’t go to church because it had lost its symbolic significance; the grain of resistance in it, the spice was gone. They took me with them from the age of three. Only enemies went to church in the fifties.”
Jaali – Horizontal is a scale copy of an architectural detail of the church of Vrosmajor in Budapest designed by the architect Bertalam Arkay in the style of Bauhaus, 1932. This work is part of a series that represents different types of windows in churches. Its title and form reference perforated architectural motifs characteristic of Indian and Islamic architecture and underlines the cultural interpretative tendencies of Modernist architecture and in particular, of Le Corbusier. The decorative forms are displaced in a formalist space of the modernist sculpture. A supplementary space is created, one that situates the object and the narrative under the form of a text that accompanies the artwork. Jaali – Horizontal questions slippage of truth in history.
Artists András Gálik and Bálint Havas began developing projects together under the name Little Warsaw in 1999. In their films, performances, and installations, the artists examine history, multiple interpretations, collective consciousness, and visual language. Their work is marked by a particular interest in historical context and the perception of artworks as a dynamic process of change in the social and political reality. A repeated strategy they employ in deconstructing perceptions of history is the displacement of monuments or objects in different contexts to undermine the fallacy of objective historical truth.