Gideon Horváth

The Whispering Hole

Curator: Katarzyna Różniak-Szabelska

One of the legends of King Midas tells of his closely guarded secret - donkey ears, with which the ruler was punished by the god Apollo. Midas hid them under his turban or hairstyle, and the shameful secret was known only to his barber. In another version of the story - the pre-Islamic legend of King Ossounes of Yenisei - the confidant of the secret was the last surviving barber in the kingdom (all previous ones had been ordered murdered). Unable to bear the weight of the secret entrusted to him, the unfortunate Midas barber was said to have gone to a meadow, dug a hole, whispered to it the words "the king has donkey ears" and promptly buried it. Some time later, a thick clump of reeds grew in the area, and they began to repeat the same phrase: "The king has donkey ears, the king has donkey ears, the king has donkey ears...". According to some accounts, the coming to light of this information led Midas to commit suicide.

In Gideon Horváth's exhibition the "whispering hole" of the title becomes a metaphor for the secrets and shame that non-heteronormative people have historically been forced to live with. The Hungarian artist is interested in their complicated lives, devoid of heroism. In his sculptural installations he explores the relationship between sensuality, sin, shame and stigma. Horváth's main sculptural material is beeswax, which the artist sees as a queer material: at once extremely fragile and highly resilient; ambivalent, fluid and constantly "becoming." Wax also represents corporeality, visceraility and vulnerability. It symbolizes a state of emotional exposure, which Horváth sees not as a passive state of suffering, but a liberating form of acting and one of possible forms of resistance.

Inspired by queer theory, Gideon Horváth's artistic practice creates a space full of mythical references for sensual and intuitive modes of experience. At the Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok, the works that compose it will be accompanied by performative actions by the artist.

Gideon Horváth is a Budapest-based visual artist, born in 1990. He studied performing arts and cinema at Université Paris VIII. (2010-2013) and intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts (2014-2015). In 2023, he was awarded the Esterházy Prize, and in 2024, for "Myths of Vulnerability," he was awarded the prize for the best solo exhibition of 2023 by the Hungarian branch of the International Association of Art Critics, AICA. He has participated in residencies at PRÁM Studio in Prague, Czech Republic (2023), Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany (2012) and Cité International des Arts in Paris, France (2020). His work has been featured in many solo exhibitions - including Memory That Could Have Been at Sidewalk (as part of the First Biennial of Contemporary Public Art in Budapest, 2023); Pulp at Pram Studio (Prague, 2023); Myths of Vulnerability at Glassyard Gallery (Budapest, 2023); Kiss of the Sun at Ena Viewing Space (Budapest, 2022); The Faun's Ball at TIC Gallery (Brno, 2021); Faun Realness at ISBN Gallery (Budapest, 2021); - as well as group shows - among others Esterházy Art Award Short List at Ludwig Museum (Budapest, 2024), ...and they lived... at Kunsthalle Bratislava (Bratislava, 2023); ; The Sea of Cheese at TRAFO (Szczecin 2023) Different Solar settings at David Kovats Gallery (London, 2022); Sensory Tales at Krinzinger Gallery (Vienna, 2022); They/Them/Their: Naturally Not Binary at IMT Gallery (London, 2022) and Hope is not Desire at Sopa Gallery (Kosice, 2022).