Tehnica Schweiz artist’s project The Blue Room is about rethinking our relationship to the built and tangible cultural heritage. It was realized in 2019 at two locations, the Tata Synagogue and the Kiscelli Museum in Budapest. The project was accompanied by an educational program, which was implemented with the support of ZSK 2028.

Tehnica Schweiz (Gergely László and Péter Rákosi) The project entitled The Blue Room was presented in two places in the summer of 2019. At the Exhibition Center of the Former Synagogue in Tata and in the Church Square of the Kiscelli Museum in Budapest - Budapest History Museum. Two very different spaces - none originally built for exhibitions - have different stories, identities, traumas, object memories, and a significant lack of them.

The Blue Room is about rethinking our relationship to the built and tangible cultural heritage. The work, which began in 2017, is intertwined with two stories: the Museum of Fine Arts ’collection of antique sculptures and the Tata Synagogue, built in the 18th century, where life-size ancient copies were“ periodically ”presented for more than forty years.

The latest work of the Tehnica Schweiz artist couple (Gergely László and Péter Rákosi) is a film and an installation, the location of the synagogue, where the restorers of the museum detach the plaster sculptures from the pedestal, take them to pieces, put them in crates and transport them. The building is gradually emptied and then a team of art students takes possession of the space, which has been temporarily converted into a studio. Young people make small porcelain copies of Greco-Roman sculptures and create an entirely new collection of accurate, scaled-down replicas of plaster. The building, which will become a monument to itself, will have a temporary function, the sculptures that once inhabited it will appear in a different quality (material, size).

The porcelain sculptures were made by Henrietta Bodnár, Gabriella Farkas, Bernadett Fúró, Badárka Nagy, Ágnes Nagy-György and Barbara Szőke, MA students of the MOME Department of Object Design, led and edited by Edit Kondor, Mónika Csák and Zsuzsa Bokor.

The music of the film was made by violinist and composer Viktor Bátki.

Curator of the project: Eszter Lázár

More information about the project can be found on the artist couple's page:

http://tehnicaschweiz.com/the-blue-room

Turai Hedvig's opening speech in the Kiscelli museum contextualizes the work:

https://artportal.hu/magazin/kezdeni-valamit-vele-masolat-menedzsment/

Educational program related to the exhibition:

The Tata site also had an educational program for local high school students. The students of the Talentum English-Hungarian Bilingual Primary School, Grammar School, and Art Vocational High School, as well as the Eötvös József Grammar School (about 60 people), got acquainted in detail with the processes, history, and context of the project. Through the work of fine art, the students came into contact with Tata’s Jewish past.

On May 22, 2019, the curator of the project, Eszter Lázár, the head of the FabLab innovation workshop, Dávid Pap, and one of the creators of The Blue Hall, Péter Rákosi, held two sessions for the students. Both programs were accompanied by a presentation by Ádám Lévai on the Tata Synagogue.

On June 23, the program of the exhibition included a city walk presenting the Jewish heritage of Tata and the intellectual legacy of Mór Fischer, led by art historian Mónika Kövesdi, an employee of the Kuny Dominican Museum.