…To be utopia, it is enough that I be a body (Michel Foucault, 1966)
PARIS-B is delighted to welcome the artist Bence Magyarlaki for their first solo show, entitled « At Saturn’s Cusp », unveiling their latest sculptures and installations.
The body and architecture are central to Bence Magyarlaki’s practice. Their works encapsulate the tensions within movement, questioning the patriarchal values reflected in our societal structures and the control on our identity and its desires.
Their sculptures are transformative in nature, addressing issues of sexuality, identity, fragility, power and social change.
Magyarlaki recovers foam and parts of abandoned furniture, transforming their geometry into new anthropomorphic gestures. The memory of the body is always present, addressing recollections of intimacy, both of one’s own body and those of others.
They use the traditional Moroccan plastering technique of Tadelakt (which means to caress). A long and precise process that involves superimposing and polishing successive layers, then smoothing out imperfections until the artist’s hand disappears.
A flexible outer shell is thus created, expanding and contracting with changes in atmospheric temperature making it feel like a moving, breathing surface. An organic body that is alive.
In their latest work, Body Schema (2022- ongoing), Uranians (2021-ongoing) and Utopian Bodies (2020- ongoing) Magyarlaki brings the idea of queertopia and an analysis of body politics into his work. All three series explore the possibilities of thinking beyond the confinement of a gendered body and therefore question the core values of a heteropatriarchal binary system.
Magyarlaki’s latest sculptures draw inspiration from their knowledge of histology, embryologie and the inner workings of the body, learnt throughout their years in medical school. Their process is to cut through the ‘skin’ of architecture to reveal its insides: new organs they re-imagine.
These works are in a state of constant evolution, like embryonic forms dividing into symmetrical and asymetrical systems, presenting a vision for a new poetic anatomy.
“My upcoming solo show at PARIS-B is a continuation to Uranus – Waiting Room my first ever solo show in Istanbul in 2021. For this show, I adapted texts from philosopher and queer icon Paul B. Preciado, namely form his book An Apartment on Uranus, to talk about body politics, memory and intimacy. I wanted to continue the planetary thread, as well as the Preciado thread, so this time we are going to Saturn, but we are also in an operating theatre, essentially inside a body.
The show is mainly a questioning of gender identity through a gaze that is simultaneously looking inwards and looking out to the celestial bodies. We are encountering parallel stories and texts from scientific space exploration to philosophy and poetry, all through a sound piece composed to accompany a variety of sculptural installations I made for the gallery.”
— Bence Magyarlaki for The Steidz
« On October 15, 1997 – September 15, 2017.
The first of these dates saw the launch of a six-ton probe called Cassini from Florida, bound for Saturn. Its mission will have lasted almost twenty years, ending on the second: 7 years of celestial crossing until it reaches the planet, then 13 spent in orbit around it, at -180°C among volcanic dunes and methane lakes. In its last days among the stars, after years of life together, Cassini, running out of fuel, plunged into Saturn’s upper layer. It burns up, disintegrating in a final atmospheric embrace; Saturnian Cassini becomes a shooting star, its six tons of metal, iron, plutonium bursting into a dust of diamonds all at once.
Isn’t this the queerest shit ever? Bence asks me.
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There are magnetometers, spectrographs and stethoscopes; there are scanners, dissections and soul-searching. Bence Magyarlaki has made an expertise of these tools for probing our inner selves. Their forms are carnal, sometimes intestinal, sometimes molecular.
They transcribe disturbances of the heart, what happens inside our bellies. Whether they stretch, coil, or retract, Bence’s sculptures demand recognition through flesh, through viscera. The artist would say that they are « abstract anthropomorphism » ; it is also because they never have a face, they resist the usual taxonomies of gender, the captivity of definitions. They prefer stellar expansion to fixed identities.
Bence zooms into a cell, and see the whole universe in it.
At Saturn’s Cusp sketches the passionate life of bodies that inform, inflame and sometimes reject each other; mechanisms of attraction where agents affect each other – like Cassini suspended by Saturn, turned by Saturn, moved in its rings, trapped by them. In her reinterpretation of Darwin’s theory, American biologist Lynn Margulis puts “symbiosis” at the core of evolution, and defines it as any biological interaction between two organisms of different species – the symbionts – over an extended period of time. Cooperation can be dissonant, lacking harmony. It can be mutual or parasitic. Not all symbioses are benign; some come at the expense of one party, sometimes at the cost of its destruction.
In any case, transformation depends on companionship; on this « long-lasting intimacy of strangers » that shapes, in various places, the work of Bence Magyarlaki. It took 13 years for Cassini to finally leave Saturn behind. »
“I’m inspired by people mostly. People who fight for their freedom, for their voice to be heard against all odds, people who have the courage to stand up for others and not just themselves. I’m inspired by artists who are able to speak the harder truths, and by those who are able to feel and care for humanity and the future of this planet.”
— Bence Magyarlaki
Catalogue of Works
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Bence Magyarlaki (b. 1992, Pécs) is a Hungarian artist currently based in Paris. Magyarlaki graduated with first class honours from BA (Hons) Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London in 2017 and has since been exhibiting internationally in the UK, France, Morocco, Portugal, Turkey and Australia. Their latest body of work has been supported by Montresso Art Foundation in Marrakesh.