Gergely Kovats

From the project 'Another world' by Gergely Kovats

Biography

Instagram: @gergelykovats

Website: www.gergelykovats.com

Gergely Kováts is a photographer based in Budapest, currently studying at Moholy-Nagy University's photography MA programme. He works on long-term projects springing from personal experience, blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction, revealing the in-between domain of the ambiguous.

The project

"We used to dream of utopia, now we dream of escape. It took a torturous and disappointing 100 years to put our po- litical imagination to sleep, but we woke up from the fever dream of the 20th century to a new, scarier nightmare. Is it a wonder we’re driven further and further away from this re- ality into worlds of words, celluloid and software? It seems all in vain though, when fantasy and the real world merge in the self-fulfilling prophecies of our dystopias.

Another World is about the loss of the political utopia: the series posits that we created thousands of imaginary worlds, because we lost our belief in being able to change this one. It explores the reasons why utopia wanders from the pages of political pamphlets to the pages of radical science fiction books. The project’s aim is to reframe the modernist narrative of progress (that’s still very much with us) as a tragic tale of loss and retreat, mixing dramatised re-enactments of related world historical events with pictures referring to the emergence of science fiction and fantasy, role-playing games and the virtual worlds of today. At a time when a second generation is growing up with no concept of the future and an inevitable sense of disaster, the goal is to make the viewer reevaluate their relationship with utopia, if for nothing else, to know what world to build on the remains of this one."

From the project 'Another world' by Gergely Kovats