Máté Csanda – Born in Czechoslovakia, grew up in Slovakia (Bratislava) in a Hungarian-speaking family. After studying painting and graphics in Düsseldorf and Kassel, second degree (MA) in art history at the University of Vienna. Since 2020 research assistant at the Institute for Art History at the University of Vienna.
As a PraeDoc assistant, I am currently working on my dissertation. On the one hand, I am concerned with the Hungarian memory dispositive – discourses on memory and identity politics of the interwar period, especially of the political right and their renaissances after 1989. On the other hand, I am dealing with the formal and narrative logic of contemporary artworks, their subversive, myth- and ideology-critical potential.
My thematic material is therefore the construction logic of Hungarian ethnonationalist identity narratives (with a focus on the conjuncture of these patterns after 1989). Furthermore, my interest lies in the heuristic, epistemological, performative dimension of contemporary art projects in the medium of the docufictional and/or in the paradigm of artistic research. My focus is – in the form of close readings – on three art projects (videos and installations) from the recent past. These consist largely of found footage / „archive material“. Practices such as montage, compilation and reenactment are strategically integrated in their work logic – while in terms of genre they are committed to the essay form, speculative fiction or approaches of critical fabulation. I regard the works as theoretical objects or prisms that, through forms of aesthetic thinking, provide us with a specific insight into the complexity of the Hungarian memory archive – which has been appropriated by right-wing national discourses or figures of competitive victimhood.