In an interview, Sándor Bátai invokes an idea formulated by Lajos Kassák, emphasizing that art “never began and will never end.” He regards the essence of artistic activity as an attempt to outwit time and transience.[1] His book objects inspired by the documents of an otherwise unknown woman, Margit Halász, discovered by chance, may also be interpreted in the spirit of this idea. Composed of layered fragments of birth and death certificates, identification photographs, and marital correspondence, these works evoke fictional, constructed narratives while simultaneously representing universal human destinies familiar to us all. Through digital and manual processes, found objects and documents are transformed into book objects and visual narratives, creating a new mythology from the life of Margit Halász. His works reflect with exceptional precision the interrelation and coexistence of graphic art, photographic collage, photo transfer, photocopy art, conceptual literature, and book art.

Digital technology does not generally dominate his practice; instead, he takes the meaning-generating potential of found photographs and official documents as his guiding principle. In doing so, he affirms the equal status and mutual interdependence of different media. The material presence of handmade paper, the blurred image fragments produced through repeated photocopying, and the dissolves and superimpositions generated during digital processing evoke the workings of collective memory. Although the individual pieces in the series are not narrative works in the classical sense, they nevertheless possess a powerful narrative structure. Behind the visual montages there is always an imagined human destiny—one that embodies the universal within the individual and the shared within the singular. As Attila Jász has observed:

“He seeks the balance that enables him to screen out, from the concrete documents of a given historical period, the excess that has already become useless to our collective unconscious. He strips down and destroys—dismantles and reconstructs—overly specific found objects and things, rendering them singular and aesthetic, yet in such a way that we may recognize our own story in them. In this manner, he creates a kind of universal basis of existence while preserving the fascination of individuality.”[2] The book objects “tell” what official history frequently forgets or suppresses: the fate, face, possessions, and unspoken stories of the ordinary individual. As the artist states in his ars poetica: “The written traces of our loss of identity and vulnerability, situated in the native realm of the grotesque, simultaneously recall the worlds of Örkény and Kafka.”[3]

(Excerpt from 11≙1011 – The Work of the Artists of the Hungarian Electrographic Art Association, 2000–2025)

A fine-tuned TTS (text-to-speech) machine narrator, pre-trained for emotional emphasis, delivers the text with an atmosphere-creating objectivity. A generative model also participated in the design of the title typography. The source material for the book objects and mail art works is a group of documents found in a handbag — the papers of Margit Halász — discovered by one of Bátai’s friends in the empty attic of his newly purchased house in Kaposvár.

The fictional stories shaped around the found objects partly draw on the artist’s own life experience and those of fellow artists, while speaking to us all with a more universal resonance. As the artist states in his ars poetica: “The pages of H. M.’s library and the objects of mail art have become a memorial to the human fate in East-Central Europe since the mid-1990s, and they recall the history of all of us, our universally valid framework of destiny. Book objects and mail art works. In the homeland of the grotesque, the written traces of our becoming faceless and our vulnerability simultaneously bring to mind the worlds of Örkény and Kafka.” Source: Sándor Bátai: Book Objects and Installations, private edition, 2025.

The literary tradition of the grotesque and the absurd appears as a cinematic form. The narration draws a mosaic-like family story organized through the soundtrack — Fiume, Rudabánya and Sztálinváros — in accordance with the genesis of the artwork ensemble, while the visual world also draws on stop-motion and undercrank techniques. Scenes recorded at a lower frame rate run at 50 fps, producing a time-compressed, slightly staccato movement. The figure of Margit Halász appears through hybrid editing, partly built from documentary sources and partly from constructed elements; the objective presentation of documentary materials acts as a counterpoint to the animated sequences.

[1] Lajos Kelemen: “Timely and Timeless: A Conversation with Visual Artist Sándor Bátai.” In: Magyar Műhely, Vol. 50, No. 160, 2012, pp. 43–46.
[2] Attila Jász: “Rescuing the Evidence of Existence, or Sándor Bátai Following in the Footprints of Time.” Introductory text to Sándor Bátai’s exhibition Book Objects and Installations. In: Arnolfini Szalon, https://szalon.arnolfini.hu/...
[3] Sándor Bátai: Book Objects and Installations. Exhibition catalogue, self-published, 2025.