Róza El-Hassan Harpagoniada # 3 Installation, 2003

While Walter Benjamin was writing his study analysing the withering of the aura of the original artwork by way of the reproduced image, World War II had not yet broken out, nor had the Iron Curtain been erected. Nevertheless, the foreboding of war determines the concluding prophecy of the text and the dissection of irresolvable contradictions the entirety of the text.

According to one of its possible readings, Benjamin essentially expounds the way in which the world changes in the age of novel, technically reproduced and realisable collective dreams. He attempts to model a bipolar order of ideas, in which "Fascism consistently leads to the aestheticisation of political life", to which "Communism responds with the politicisation of art". Benjamin could not avoid mention of where the objects turn up, when "the cameras of journalists peel from them their protective membrane, and shatter their auras", nor of the fact that in no way do they cease to exist; moreover, they are engendered again and again.

The aura of some seemingly privileged objects would be marked for protection from here on out in the ideally clean white exhibition space, the "white cube". My work, in any case, accepts solidarity with those objects, which, in the course of history wound up en masse in the pawnshop or in the warehouses of the characteristically Hungarian legal successor, BÁV (Bizományi Áruház Vállalat / Consignment Department Store Company). The unselected, playful, archaic phenomena growing out of such warehouse department stores determine the particular situation of our artworks through to the present day.

My work in the Aura exhibition reflects upon the local world of objects that survive technical and political intervention.