NÉMETH HAJNAL: CRASH – PASSIVE INTERVIEW

Hajnal Németh’s installation Crash – Passive Interview will be on show in the Hungarian Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2011.

The skeleton of the work is a contemporary opera that takes place on the stage of life, relating, and reflecting on the stories of car crashes in a dialogical form: the critical moment slowed down by memory and recounted in utmost detail; the drive and the course of events leading up to that moment; as well as the complex relation of man to driving, in view of his inclination to fetishize his technical objects.

Filling the space as an acoustic experience, the piece will also be presented at the show in the form of a musical film.

The installation is complemented with the librettos of the dialogues, namely the written records of the passive interviews, as well as the real life wreck of a car totalled in a crash, which occupies the space as an evocative artefact. Beyond the individual events that are recorded, sung, or impressed in a chassis, the composed versions of individual life stories suggest the possibility of determinacy with regard to human destiny.