Antiquarium
Adam Geczy(AU)
6.9.-10.10.2025
At Home Gallery
At first, it would seem that there is no better place to exhibit Adam Geczy's Antiquarium (2025) than the At Home Gallery. After all, it is a work of repurposing shown in a repurposed space. Old photographic portraits are displayed against the textured and tiled walls of a gallery that itself was once the Šamorín synagogue. Yet there is a possible contrast between the name of the gallery: "At Home Gallery", and a show that undermines the comforts of historical ignorance – the unsettling work may leave one feeling not at home, even imbuing the space with an uncanny sense of being without a home. Photographs document but also haunt. They exist to remember but, after the death of their subject, they mark the forgotten. Then there are the ballet shoes, with pebbles inside them, furthering an atmosphere of discomfort. Apocalyptic, deserted scenes from Chernobyl play on either side of the gallery in such a way that when entering the gallery, one does not immediately see the videos. Yet perhaps it is not only the past that is being mourned. The sequences are not only melancholic but ominous, perhaps prophesying the future. Such mourning also constitutes a threat to a certain contemporary sensibility of forgetfulness. Mourning becomes a threat as remembering the dead can both portend future horrors and frame current horrors. As such, the gallery reinforces the work, offering a shrine to faded spectres and unwelcome premonitions, with the gallery's name gaining an ironic intonation. � Geczy's salvaged photographs were collected from antiquariums in Budapest in 2001– a year that commenced the millennium but also a year associated with catastrophe and the start of a global war. He has enlarged these images of people from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The images are tinted in single colours like silent films, and at times, Geczy has placed passages from the German translation of Imre Kertész's novel, Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért (1990) over the images. The decision to colourise the photographs resists the tendency to use AI to "bring photographs back to life", which inevitably obscures the photographic meaning. The images have been transformed from their postcard size to much larger sizes (A3 and A4). Such modifications serve aesthetic and evocative ends, rendering the images uncanny, but these changes also remind us that the past is mediated and transformed through cultural recollection. As with antiquities and other objects of the past, the images become stripped of specificity and are transformed in their display.
The photographs of people contrast with images of castles, but despite or because of the juxtaposition, both assume the status of lost and recovered artefacts. Castles have come to represent Europe's past and have associations with grandeur but also tourism, merchandise, marketing and film sets. The original purpose of castles was defensive and one may wonder if there is a comment about the emergence of fortress Europe, or a nod to the fact that war once again has reached Europe. Apart from the Gothic and Romantic associations, whereby castles came to haunt Enlightenment-inflected Europe, castles also signify deception. There are many false or simulated castles out there, from the Disney castles (both in animation and in Disney theme parks), to recently constructed castles that serve as homes. A number of celebrated and popular European castles are 19th century constructions: Mad King Ludwig commissioned the Neuschwanstein Castle, as an homage to Wagner's operas. Another instance is Vajdahunyad Castle in Hungary, where despite being built around a medieval structure, the newer, 19th century facade simulates the grandeur of the past (as with the Disney castle which was inspired by Neuschwanstein).
Given that deception is both an element of cultivation but frequently risks the confections of kitsch, Geczy's inclusions of castles such as Vajdahunyad Castle evoke concomitantly history and historical pretence, rewriting, and repurposing. There is also an image of Hallstatt in Austria, a village once isolated that has come to be a space of what is dubbed "overtourism".
The photographs of people frequently include images of the young and old. For instance, there is a photograph, tinted purple, of a young bourgeois woman in profile. Then there is an image of three children tinted blue: a girl to the right-hand side, holds a net with a ball in one hand and a boy's hand in the other, and another, presumably younger girl (a sister?) walks to the side. It is an image of happiness. All three are smiling, but it is only the older girl, the one holding the boy's hand, whose gaze meets the camera. The image contrasts with another image, this time of a classroom. In the classroom we see children staring at the camera. Only a few of the children are smiling. Most have earnest faces and are perhaps dressed too formally, seeming almost adult and disproportioned with faces too old for their bodies. Behind them there is a moustached male teacher with earnest eyes and a woman who smiles. Photographic etiquette in these images has not been resolved. We do not know the future of these people or the lives that they will lead, but we know the century that awaits.
These images have been recontextualised in relation Kertész's novel, which in 2004 was translated into English as Kaddish for an Unborn Child. More properly, as Geczy contends, the title should read "not-born child", as the novel is about the decision to not bring a child into the world rather than a child who has yet to be born. The term Kaddish refers to a Jewish prayer. Reciting a prayer for a non-existent, never-born and never-will-be-born child affirms the seriousness of the decision. The decision to forego bringing new life into the world was not a lifestyle choice. There is even a sense of guilt in Kertész recounting as he addresses his not born child and his refusal to have a child with his (ex) wife, "my existence viewed as the potentiality of your being, or in other words, me as a murderer [...] I can be assured of being in complete safety, having ruined everything, smashed everything to bits, with that 'no'." Here a hypothetical loss, a loss of potential haunts the present but remains itself an insignia of historical trauma.
Geczy's use of passages from the novel include long swathes of the novel's text. With these photographs and through the passages of Kertész, a question arises as to whether Geczy is educating us. As Adorno memorably asserted, "The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again." As with a stone in the shoe, one is meant to be bothered by history, weighed down by it. As Geczy notes, the concern of the exhibition is "lost memory, from the ignorance of the missteps of history to the lack of interest in the lives of earlier generations." Memory is already the echo of loss: we remember that which no longer is. In what Clive James referred to as a "cultural amnesia", there is a loss of loss. The digital remembers so that we don't have to, but this does not diminish, in fact it intensifies, the responsibility to remember. It is all too easy to judge those from the past. We all like to think that we would have spoken up or would have been on the right side of history. With global crises and the various issues facing Europe, sadly, such tests have returned and are likely to multiply.
The use of text related to the decision not to have children calls into the current issues of Europe's population. There has been a decline in children being born in Europe, with only 1.38 live births per woman in 2023. The median age in Europe reached 44.7 years in January, 2024 – a perverse turn of events for a region that considers itself to be the old world. As such, one possible meaning of the pebble in the ballet shoes is the notion of a self-inflicted injury. Stones after all carry associations of self-submersion and suicide. But in the context of Kertész's passages and photographic and videographic forms of memory, the pebbles in the ballet shoes may also remind one of the collections of shoes that form memorials to those who were exterminated by the Nazis. In such a vein, the pebbles may call to mind Jochen Gerz's Platz des Unsichtbaren Mahnmals (The Place of the Invisible Memorial) (1991/1992), where the names of German Jewish cemeteries were inscribed on the underside of pebbles in front of the Saarbrücken castle. Walking on the stones serves as a reminder that one is stepping on history while also memorialising the dead without glorifying them. Alternatively, or additionally, one may think of the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones), started by Gunter Demnig, where brass plaques were integrated into sidewalks in front of homes and businesses of people who were murdered in the Holocaust. Such a practice has extended to commemorating victims of Pinochet in Chile.
There is even the possible connotation of fairytales, namely Hans Christian Andersson's The Red Shoes. Ballet itself entails physical pain and damage to the feet and joints in part to convey effortless grace and beauty. As Nietzsche once quipped, there is no festival without cruelty. Perhaps, the shoes also have a personal meaning as many come from Geczy's collection. Some of the shoes are new while others are used or worn, again accentuating time and premonition when considered with the two videos that show devastation. As such, the possible meanings are far from exhausted as weight and delicacy merge, or perhaps the levity of facade and cultivation is contrasted with the marks (wounds?) of time. The shoes cannot be worn with the pebbles and the videos do not feature people, possibly prophesying a future without humanity. Such emptiness is accentuated with footage of children's play equipment and dilapidated and depopulated classrooms, and the images of peeling paint that resemble peeling flesh. Such sites of destruction come to provide something of the function of castles did for Romantic writers and painters, signifying the wreck of civilisation. This sense is compounded by images of books strewn in a destroyed space, and we see footage of smouldering and burnt forests, evoking the apocalypse.
This speaks to the seriousness of Geczy's work. Given the use of media, there may be a myriad of comparisons, comparisons that could intimidate other artists. Janaina Tschäpe, for instance, set her video work, Lacrimacorpus (2004) in castle of Ettersburg near Weima, which overlooked Buchenwald but had also been the summer residence Goethe. In the work, Tschäpe, twirls around the lavish space, dressed as a ballet dancer covered in balloons that represent tears. The use of historical photographs may also remind viewers of Christian Boltanski. It is to Geczy's credit that he does not fear comparison. Unafraid of seriousness, can also find continuities with Geczy's other works. Geczy has explored issues of facade and place. For instance, Geczy's work Beautiful Cities (2012) challenges the idea of beautiful cities, "desublimating" spaces. All cities have parts that are banal, ugly or polluted and Geczy's installation featured graffiti on walls and projections of banal and ugly parts of supposedly majestic and beautiful cities. One may also think of Geczy's collaborations with Blak Douglas, which skewer colonial Australia's self-image, including their 2013–2014 exhibition, BOMB, at AAMU Museum of contemporary Aboriginal art, Utrecht. Geczy and Douglas have continued to explore the ongoing traumas of the First Nations people and the cruelties of Australian settler-colonial society. As such, historical trauma is not a new or trendy theme for Geczy.
However, it would be wrong though to consider Antiquarium to be the culmination of themes explored in Geczy's previous works, since it would traduce and limit their distinctiveness. With this work, part of what Geczy is capturing is the experience of being in an antiquarium, of being amid the whispers of the past. Antiquariums may seem antiquated to some or may themselves be mourned. Yet this itself is worth holding onto as the work serves in part as a corrective to the state of being unmoored from history, offering a rebuke to a period when historical memory is attacked, jettisoned, or forgotten.
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Artist Bio
Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at the University of Sydney. His work is in the fields of painting and drawing, photomedia, video, installation and performance. His exhibitions across Australia and Europe including two solo/solo-collaborative museum exhibitions.
His work has received considerable critical acclaim and is in numerous national collections in Australia including Queensland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia. As a writer, Geczy has a longstanding reputation as an art critic and theorist. With some 25 books including from Bloomsbury, Routledge and Rutgers U.P., in 2009 he won the Choice award for best academic title in art.
He is also founding editor of the journals The Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, and
ab-Original (both Penn State University Press). This present work reprises themes engaged with in exhibitions at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and at Trafó, Budapest in 2001.
The artist would like to acknowledge and thank the University of Sydney for its generous support.
A Note from the Gallery
Suzanne Kiss - At Home Gallery
When selecting an artist for the synagogue in Šamorín, the work is of course important, but so too is the question, will the artist fundamentally understand the space? Along with its physical character, there is the spiritual significance, the ever-present weight of history amidst current implications of our location, community, and the times in which we live. Creating a sensitive and relevant work for this space can be a challenging task, and so it can be said that the synagogue itself chooses its artists.
Adam Geczy has thoughtfully prepared such a work with his installation entitled Antiquarium. This multi-faceted artist and author of many books on art and fashion travels a long way to us from Sydney, Australia. His name (Hungarian in origin), suggests a possible background with connections perhaps not far from here.
Antiquarium invites us to make some uncomfortable connections. The collected images, text, objects and videos remind us of the past, point out the fragility of our current situation, and confront us with the threat of what might yet happen. The artist's impressive grasp of the place as a whole speaks to the wisdom of the synagogue's choice.
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Program galerie z vereiných zdrojov podborili / Supported using the public funding by Fond na podporu umenia, Fond na podporu kultúry národnostných menšín, Mesto Šamorín
Autor: Adam Geczy
Graphic design - Mária Čorejová, Noe Kiss
Production - Suzanne Kiss, Noe Kiss, Csaba Kiss
Otvorené | Nyitva | Open: V pripade záujmu, prosime, kontaktujte nás | Megállapodás szerint | By appointment.
Address: Mliečňanská 7, 93101 Šamorín,
tel:+421903255681, email:
YXRob21lZ2FsbGVyeSB8IGdtYWlsICEgY29t,
Výstava potrvá do 10. októbra A kiállítás október 10-ig tekinthető meg, The exhibition runs until 10 October
The artist would like to acknowledge and thank the University of Sydney for its generous support.
Program galérie z verejných zdrojov podborili /Supported using the public funding by
Fond na podporu umenia. Fond na podporu kultúry národnostných menšín. Mesto Šamorín
Also check out other Arts events in Bratislava, Exhibitions in Bratislava, Literary Art events in Bratislava.
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