Personal Utopia

2021, site specific installation

MUTO Group Gallery, Budapest

The project deals with the idea of utopia as a search for an ideal form of architecture and society, childhood memories, paradise garden, New Age as a mix of different esoteric approaches or conspiracy theories.

Utopia lies in the tension between the criticism of the present in a search for solutions in the future made with reference to the past.

Utopia is inherently ambivalent – it contains the discrepancy between the pursuit of perfection and an alternative to the current situation in conflict with the reality of human nature and emotions.

Ecotopia consists of the expanded painting. The branches, found in the neighborhood create a web that could be a kind of safety net for all civilization.

TriQAnon refers to the local retrotopia of the big nation before Trianon and at the same time indicates to a far-right American conspiracy community QAnon.

As Zygmunt Bauman writes in his latest book, the present is stigmatized by retrotopia – nostalgia for the future. “Five centuries after Thomas More gave the name Utopia to the Millennium Dream of Mankind about returning to Paradise or bringing Paradise to Earth, another Hegelian triad created by double negation is now approaching its cycle. Once the prospects for human happiness has been relaxed, detached from any particular topos, and individualized, privatized and personalized, it is now their turn to be negated by what they bravely and almost successfully tried to negate. Retrotopia is now emerging – its rejection followed by renewal: visions placed in a lost / stolen / abandoned but not dead past, instead of being tied to a still unborn and thus non-existent future.”

Art critique by Vanya Zsofia: https://www.kortarsonline.hu/aktual/balunova-personal-utopia.html