Krisztina Erdei with Dániel Misota
KRISZTINA ERDEI
Kristina Erdei is a visual artist born in Szeged, Hungary, currently living in Budapest. She graduated from the University of Szeged with a degree in Philosophy, and received her PhD in Multimedia Art from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design with a dissertation entitled "Fighting for your story, memory research and contemporary art in the 21st century". His broader interests include visual culture, interdisciplinary and collaborative art practices. She is typically concerned with the cohesiveness and connectivity of communities, looking for the defining characters that shape and enable collective action. Erdei is currently a student at the Eötvös Loránd University Doctoral School of Philosophy, an assistant professor at the Partium Christian University and an art critic for the Magyar Narancs weekly liberal magazine with a strong satirical tone.
Krisztina Erdei is a sensitive artist committed to working with communities. She is open to different mediums, but basically works in the field of photography and creates her series with a critical approach. Her aesthetics are unsought, instinctive, often her image seems to be created randomly, while in fact she builds complex connections in her works. In her multi-layered series, which actively involve the viewer in the process of drawing conclusions, her strong yet sympathetic opinion evokes the basic values of humanistic photography, reimagined in a 21st-century's context. http://krisztinaerdei.com/
DÁNIEL MISOTA (1992) is a filmmaker and media artist from Budapest whose work is concerned with the critical potential of film style. Upon graduating from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2022 he worked as cinematographer on various art, film and television projects across Europe resulting in notable collaborations with Joseph Tasnadi on his film ‘La Primavera’ and Talya Feldman on her multi-channel film installation ‘Psithurism’. His thesis film ‘Mária Kerényi, 41, July 1970’ — a reenactment of a propaganda film from the 1970s — has been presented in the exhibition ‘Re:Re: Artistic re-enactments, the art of re-enactment’ at MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art. He is currently working on his PhD on emancipatory cinematic forms.
https://www.instagram.com/daniel_probablement/
FROM GLASS HUT TO BEYOND RADIOACTIVE WASTE
The research-based art project by Krisztina Erdei and Dániel Misota engages with the community of Bátaapáti. The work enables different generations within the community to add their personal stories to the official histories constructed by political and economic powers. Their installation, which portrays the village through short scenes, deals with the interwoven layers of past, present and future, highlighting the human and post-human context of the nuclear waste repository that opened on the outskirts of the village in 2011.
One of these scenes evokes the Apponyi family, a noble family that has been central to the history of Bátaapáti. This noble family owned large tracts of land in the village, and were mainly involved in viticulture. In 1840 they built a neoclassical mansion in the village, which became the center of economic life at the time. In the scene, illustrated with a still image here, a photographer takes a picture of the Apponyi family. Géza Apponyi and his family are played by another local family of high-standing. Instead of the Apponyi-Manor, the photo shooting was re-enacted in the current economic center of Bátaapáti, the nuclear waste facility, and its most representative hall, the visitor centre, thus creating a parallel between the economic processes of the past and the present.
