Fimuei, Sebestyen
Pletzl / 2019
Yiddish street sign, Paris
Located in Paris’s Marais district, a small quarter of a few streets was for centuries the heart of the Parisian Jewry; this Jewish quartier was known colloquially as the Pletzl, meaning ‘small place’ in Yiddish, a Jewish language which has always been at home in this quarter.
Today the Pletzl is fastly losing its character, but it still has a handful of synagogues and it has Jewish bakeries, restaurants, kosher butchers, cafés and bookstores in its most iconic Rue des Rosiers street and its side streets. These reminders of the quarter’s warm, village atmosphere, which was characteristic to it until just a few decades ago are like a magnet for visitors, tourists, locals, Jews and non-Jews alike.
Pitcairn / 2018
Island Vehicle Registration System, Pitcairn Island
Pitcairn in the remote South Pacific is the last remaining British territory in Oceania. With its mere four dozen inhabitants, Pitcairn is today the smallest nation of our planet. The Pitkerners are a biracial ethnic group descended mostly from nine Bounty mutineers and a handful of Tahitian captives who settled on the island in 1790, a story that has been retold in countless books and films. Notwithstanding its small size and tiny population Pitcairn surprisingly has most of the basic hallmarks of nationhood of a ‘country’ (such as: an unique history, ethnogenesis, national day, own flag, coat of arms, national anthem, a distinctive identity and even its own internet domain). It appeared to me that although everyone on the island owns a 4 wheel quad bike (which they can only drive if they apply for a local driving license), there is one thing missing, unlike anywhere else in the world: vehicle registration plates.
Bliss / 2014
photo-appropriation through pixel transcription
Bliss by Charles O’Rear was for more than a decade the most recognised, the most widespread picture in the world. Bliss has become this widely known thanks to a number of characteristic features of our age such as capitalism, globalization, and digital technology. The picture’s rise to fame was ensured when it was chosen by Microsoft as the default background image for its computer operating system XP, which turned out to be an exceptional success in the IT world. At its peak XP was used by more than 80 percent of computer users, and it remained the most widely used operating system until August 2012. On 8 April 2014 Windows ended support for XP. I realized that thus the Bliss is bound to disappear quite soon, not just from our screens, but also from our visual memory.
Vita
born in Budapest
Education
Transdisciplinary Arts, BA at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna
Fine Arts
since 2020 Media Art, HGB Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig