Ilona Németh — Armchairs

The video installation Armchairs consists of four armchairs with characteristic design evoking the vintage furniture of the 1960s. They are intimately connected to the home environment of the author, the interior of the flat, based on her childhood rememberances. One part of the installation (projected on one of the exhibited armchairs) is a video projection showing a projected image of people repeatedly sitting down and standing up from an armchair. The video-image is being projected in the way that in a certain moment a bystander or bygoer can perceive the figures as if they were really present. As the installation is interactive and the viewer can really sit down on the armchair, he/she becomes its part. The author confronts, thanks to the real and illusory human figures, not only the contradictory categories of the real and imaginary, that play an important role in the visual arts. The intimacy of the situation is becoming an important feature, because the author works with the memory of her family and her own memories, into which she enables to enter the viewers themselves. In this work, as well as in other projects (Časť/Part, 2000, Pozvanie na výstavu/Invitiation for a visit, 2001) she thematizes the interconnection of the public and the private.

Ilona Németh works especially with object, installation, video art and art in public spaces. The characteristic traits of her 1990s artwork are the usage of the specific natural and organic material (wicker, clay, water, straw, hair) and site-specific installations created for the space of the former synagogues (Labyrint/Labyrinth, 1996, Ján Koniarek Gallery in Trnava, Cesta/The Way, 1996, Synagogue in Šamorín). Already in this period she brings to the foreground of her work the contemporary issues of the society which dominate in the first years of the new millennium in the projects characteristic for their sociological research. At the end of the 1990s there are emerging also the first interactive installations in author´s work which enable the viewer to create the first contact with the artwork itself.