A whale on the Danube: the Krasznahorkai show in Szentendre

Summer edition

Earlier this year, we posted a series about László Krasznahorkai’s world-literary presence: about the circulation of his works in translation. (Part 1, part 2, and part 3.) We got the idea for the series when Péter Király met with Zsófia Júlia Szilágyi, the curator of an exhibition about László Krasznahorkai. We offered to provide the project with our data and our analysis of it—the posts grew out that work. The show Minduntalan. Krasznahorkai László prózavilága / Time and time again: the narrative universe of László Krasznahorkai opened at one of the venues of the Ferenczy Museum complex in Szentendre, Hungary, on June 14, and will stay open until October 26.

We are of course proud that in a small way, we were able to contribute to the show, and it was very exciting to see our names on the walls of the gallery—but that is not the reason why we decided to write this up. Rather, we wanted to think a bit about the idea of an exhibition that explores the oeuvre—rather than the life—of an author, and how this particular exhibition approached it.

About a month apart, but both of us were able to go. Here is a post about our impressions.

This post has a lot of pictures—it is much longer than what would fit in an email, so click on the link and read it in the browser or the app.

Literary exhibits are a challenging genre. There is the relics-plus-biography approach (here is a chair, its seat worn shiny by the creative effort; here is a photo of the great writer when two months old; here are some photos of the writer’s family, or photos demonstrating the heartbreaking lack thereof; here is a photo of the writer collecting butterflies; here are the unavoidable manuscripts you won’t be able to actually read; a favorite pen; some first editions). The alternative seems to be the life-and-times contextual approach (newspapers, images, documents, objects, film clips illustrating the social setting and how the writer was enmeshed in it, identifying the big issues of the day the work grapples with). In either case, biography takes precedence over the work.

How do you create an exhibit that engages with the literary work? How do you engage with a literary oeuvre through images? This is the challenge the Krasznahorkai show took up, and the fact that it did already makes it a success. Krasznahorkai’s work is a unique opportunity in this regard—his collaborations with artists and the movie adaptations are obvious sources for visual materials. The settings of the novels in rural Hungary, in a small town in the east of Germany, in New York City, in Japan, characters visiting Köln, Schaffhausen, Ulanbator, or living in the hills near Szentendre, and the fact that the author actually visited these locations, also create opportunities for an exhibition. The ambition of the show goes beyond documenting locations, however: it identifies a series of interconnected images and topoi through quotations from the novels, with movement, being on the road, as the central one.

The show reveals practically nothing about Krasznahorkai’s private life. In one of the rooms, there is a chronology (mostly the dates of publication, of prizes, residencies, etc.) arranged in two undulating columns, one in Hungarian, one in English, to suggest a winding road behind a figure in a long overcoat and a hat. The context implies that the figure is LK, but the image appears to have been lifted from a still of the seemingly endless march across desolate November fields in Béla Tarr’s Satantango. It is Irimiás, played by Mihály Vig. The author and his main characters blend into each other. So much so that, as we learnt from the curator, the picture of the walking man is in fact a composite of images of MV and LK…

There are other texts on the walls, mini-essays written in Krasznahorkai-like meandering sentences, all emphasizing what the subtitle of the exhibition (László Krasznahorkai’s narrative universe) already suggests—that this is an exploration of a fictional world. The spaces of the show are tied together by textual threads, quotes from Krasznahorkai on long scrolls of paper winding through rooms and hallways. As one of the wall labels suggests

… we model Krasznahorkai’s world of fiction, interwoven with references, variations and reinterpretations, through quotes from across the oeuvre that speak about being on the road, and present them in a network with related artworks, so the visitor can gain a sense, while doing the untangling, of the associative structure of the exhibition, whose organization principle is not chronological.

There are of course plenty of images of LK, appearing in arrangements either deeply ironic, or unintentionally comical? An exhibition like this inevitably has a cultic dimension to it. It should not turn you off.

There are no pictures in the show of LK as a private person: he always appears as the author, as a writer among other writers and artists, or as a stylized persona—as in the picture above, by the artist Imre Bukta, whose deeply ironic, faux-naive work can easily trick the spectator. Walking up the stairs one of us understood this as a cultic, celebratory installation—which it inevitably is, of course, at least until you learn that the photo by Bukta shows Krasznahorkai as Van Gogh. And then it suddenly became possible to see the portrait as a joke on LK’s persona, his self-presentation as high brodernist visionary—flickering between sarcasm and admiration?

While LK knew about the exhibition, he did not participate in the curation or the organization. Most of the objects come from public collections, primarily from the Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library, where his papers are now kept. (It says something about the Gleichschaltung and general demise of public institutions in Hungary, and about the relationship between the writers and the regime, that the papers of major contemporary authors like Krasznahorkai, Kertész, Nádas, and Péter Esterházy all ended up in foreign archives. Magda Szabó is an exception—but she passed away two decades ago, and unlike other authors with comparable visibility in translation, she also does not seem to have made the arrangements herself.)

Krasznahorkai in oil (another work by Bukta) and on VHS (by László Fe Lugossy)

But back to the show—and the location, which is far from random. Throughout the 20th century, Szentendre had a fascinating art scene, part of it now the subject of the network of museums scattered in small buildings across the town. The museums were established in the late 20th century—a fundamentally conservative enterprise. In the 1980s, LK was part of a vaguely neoavantgarde, countercultural scene that emerged as the town was becoming a tourist destination. Some of the artists he hung out with performed in the two major movies made from his novels; he participated in performances with them and still involves them in some of his book launches, which include elements of performance art. The part of the exhibition that documents these collaborations might be the most interesting, the works in the room are suggestive of a genuine creative exchange.

The ascetic art of Pál Deim, a painter whose work has string connections to a generation of mid-century Szentendre modernists, also plays a big role in the show—Deim’s art on the cover of the first edition of Sátántangó also informed, four decades later, the design of the largest room of the exhibition. His art also appeared on other books by LK.

Pál Deim and LK

In addition to looking at collaborations of various sorts, there are also the adaptations as a way to access the work. So there is a whale—a prop from the Budapest State Opera House’s production of Valuska by Péter Eötvös, an opera based on “The Werckheimer Harmonies,” the central part of The melancholy of resistance.

There are of course the collaborations with Béla Tarr, undoubtedly a major aspect of the LK universe—appearing here as posters, clips, and stills.

Two fantastic photo-paintings by Péter Gémes upstairs help tie the exhibition together. The two angels preside over a series of black-and-white transparencies, that include texts, film stills, and also a triptych of a Mario Merz igloo, a transparency of the transparent object that features in War and War.

From the 1990s on, as he began to explore Europe, America, as well as East Asia, both personally and as the settings of his novels, LK also sought to associate his works and himself with other artists—sometimes in ways that made, at least to this reader, limited sense. One of us thought that the photos by Ornan Rotem and the works on paper by Max Neumann are illustrations rather than anything else, their relationship to the fictional universe representational. They are compelling works, but would be at home in any traditional exhibition organized around the oeuvre of a writer—whereas the documents of the 1980s-1990s Szentendre and Budapest art scene are suggestive of a context of conceptual experimentation that revealed something about the inspiration behind Krasznahorkai’s own formal experiments, before the style would have become routinized. Thematic links are one thing—what it means for an understanding of LK’s work that he spoke at the opening of a show of Tamás St.Auby’s installation of 24 lead bells is quite another.

The global ambition and reach of the work is revealed through maps of the novels’ settings, and through a visualization of our analysis of the data about the translations that is much more spectacular than what we have been able to produce…

Graphic designer Ágnes Herr did an amazing job (also with the data we provided...)

These graphs, maps, and trees reflect movement—not only the movement of the works and of the globe-trotting author, but also the movement the works are so interested in, the movement between centers and peripheries that organize all the books and allegorize the structure of a world that is falling apart.

A wonderful feature of the exhibition is in fascinating contrast to the scale of these visualized connections. The original artworks and larger objects are accompanied by a series of small boxes—Cornell boxes on various topics related to LK’s works: documentation of the real life event of a whale traveling across Hungary in 1961, with photos, flyers, news articles. A box focused on LK speaking about the lead bells. A box about the Merz igloo, including a sketch as it would appear among the hills above Szentendre, where LK lives. (As we have learnt, the sketch placing the igloo in the landscape is actually by Merz.) Readings and performances and social events with other writers. These intimate, Cornell- or even Max Ernst-like little compositions turn the often didactic experience of contextualization into something much more playful.

Let’s hope they will be archived somewhere after the exhibition is taken down at the end of October.

Minduntalan
Krasznahorkai László prózavilága

Time and time again
The narrative universe of László Krasznahorkai
15. June 2025. – 26. October, Thursdays through Sundays, 10-6.

Ferenczy Museum Center
MűvészetMalom / ArtMill (the gallery is in a late-19th c. sawmill)
2000 Szentendre, Bogdányi utca 32.

Curator and author of the wall texts: Zsófia Júlia Szilágyi
English translation: Árpád Mihály. (ÁM also knows a very good ćevap joint—the town still has some ethnic Serbs—outside the most touristy area, under a big tree, where the beer was also excellent.)
Visual conception: Timea Andorka
Graphic design: Ágnes Herr

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Szentendre is by the way a very pretty place. There is a beach. Kayaks, swimmers. No whales. And then you go back to Budapest taking the suburban rail whose carriages were new when Krasznahorkai started writing his first novel. Locals immediately pick the window seats on the side where there will be shade, because there is no air conditioning. In an hour, you are back in Budapest, and wonder how much has really changed since the 1980s.