The physical, emotional and intellectual experiences of Tibor Hajas’s performances centring around his own body are recorded by a series of personal rites and the organised tableaus “documenting” them (photos by János Vető). Surface Torturing III is a panel from a series of three works. Photo-woodoo, the magic doubling of the tools of violating one’s own boundary (flashlight – burn scar, body painting) is decisive in the action as well: dual torturing of picture and body (emulsion laceration).The body petrified in the gestures and happenings of “self-erasure” is the “victim or creator of the events”, cast into cold white or black space, naked. Here in a triptych composition: on the left wounded, with “charred” maimed legs; in the middle: his own shadow devours him like a black hole, he is standing, grabbing at his throat as if he were suffocating, his face a “glowing” hole; on the right: with a defensive, defeated gesture holding his head, while his back “is set on fire”, his loins already scorched. The subtitles of further pieces in the series – Senses, Pompeii – generate the sequence of further associations: Hiroshima, Prague 1968, the Buddhist monk of the Vietnam war…
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