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BATTLEFIELDS is a book collaboration between Anne Murray and Zolt Asta (birth name, Zsolt Asztalos). The photographic works presented are the sites of battlefields from WWI and WWII in Hungary and Italy and were created by Asta independently upon visits to these locations. These works are his means of personalizing a shared history, a presence of the deepest human experiences of life and death, pain and survival. Through the photographs of Asta, poems emerged and were composed by Murray in a direct connection to these presentations; without the work of Asta, these poems would not have been born. Asta's production of recording these memories becomes an edited version of history through his perspective and unique emotional and psychological interaction as a production of mental landscapes. This formation of mental landscapes has also been termed scientifically as memory mapping, which includes both editing and personalizing the process of recording memory and its recollection. These photographs are a continuation of thematic perceptions and investigations, which Asta began under his birth name, Zsolt Asztalos, with his series,
Fired but Unexploded, at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 in the Hungarian Pavilion, where he was selected to represent his country with this solo show installation.
Poetry. Art. Photography by Zolt Asta.
About the author
Anne Murray is a writer, artist, and curator. Her work explores human and other, language and absence, identifying new pathways to connect, while imagining herself as both an octopus and a stone. This research manifests in various media including poetry, video, installation, performance, photography, social practice, and art criticism. Educated at Parsons School of Design in Paris and Pratt Institute in New York, she now lives in Budapest. Her video work Exquisite Exodus was included in Cf as part of the Research Pavilion curated by Jeanette Doyle at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and at La Biennale Méditerranéenne d'Art Contemporain d'Oran, Algeria. She has exhibited in Europe, Asia, and the United States.
