Gergely László

Gergely László (b. 1979) lives and works in Budapest. László also works in collaboration with Péter Rákossy under the name: Tehnica Schweiz. His projects, as well as the ones for Tehnica Schweiz, often deal with notions around the dynamics of communities and the political/social influences of the photographic medium and the archive. He made use of his autobiographical elements and family archive for the performance The Collective Man. The narrative evolves around Israel’s best-known communist kibbutz that was founded near Tulkarem – bordering the Westbank – by young Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust. It was named Yad Hanna (Hannah Memorial) in homage to the heroic memory of Hanna Szenes. The founders of the kibbutz – officially established on April 10, 1950 and famous for its committed leftism – also included the younger sister of Gergely László’s maternal grandmother as well as her husband, who are still among the hundreds to live on the premises of the once exemplarily managed settlement.

The Yad Hanna Kibbutz Project is the reconstruction of the (hi)story of a community, which presents the richness of its differences, patterns and identities – which continued to exist even in conditions of uniformization and which became determining factors with the change of those conditions – in the context of personal and collective memory. Gergely László was a resident at the ISCP, New York in 2010 and his upcoming solo exhibition include Ernst Museum, Műcsarnok and Kunsthalle Budapest (2010-2011).