installation view: Coda, Einspach Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, 2023
In his latest artworks on view in Coda at Einspach Gallery, Tamas Dezsö examines the relationship between humans and nonhumans, and the limits of human knowledge and interpretation. The exhibition reflects on the devastating forest fires in the Sierra Nevada witnessed in recent years. Since 2020, about one million hectares of forest have burned, and both the frequency and the intensity of fires show an upward trend. The three works in the show, a photograph, a charcoal triptych, and a sound installation, grew out of Dezsö’s on-site experience.
Rather than mirroring the tragedy itself, the more urgent task is to point beyond it, toward a deeper understanding of our relation to nonhuman beings. Dezsö achieves this. The photograph Kings Canyon shows the upper section of a pine’s burnt trunk rising skyward, with rocky ground and a few living pines in the background. The triptych Transcript is an enormous charcoal drawing that traces the alarm calls of one hundred bird species native to the Sierra Nevada. The sound installation Landscape (2023, two-channel electroacoustic composition by Áron Birtalan, György Cséka, and Tamas Dezsö) is a ten-minute work in which birdsong, transformed and distorted, moves from chirps to alarm calls and finally to a crushing noise collage that suggests voices vanishing in the fire.
The Anthropocene confronts us with unfamiliar natural phenomena that resist interpretation from an anthropocentric viewpoint. We like to separate culture from nature, yet this dualism has never held. They meet, affect one another, and are ultimately inseparable. Recognizing this does not mean that humans and nonhumans belong together in any simple sense. What looks like belonging is often a network of entanglements among fundamentally alien beings. As anthropocentric frameworks become untenable, our habitual analogies fail. Nature slips our previous interpretive grids and discloses an unfamiliar face. One of art’s urgent tasks today is to show the world in its own otherness and to acknowledge human embeddedness in nature together with our distance from it.
A first step toward a post-anthropocentric view is to indicate the alterity of nonhuman beings, our distance from them, and the absence of any shared experience. Each work here uses a distinct symbolic system and makes visible the limits of its own mediation. Even together they do not claim complete knowledge. They foreground its fragmentary character.
Kings Canyon approaches the symbolic. The ruined ground is out of frame. We see only the thinning trunk reaching upward, as if trying to flee or becoming a sound cut short. The pine withdraws into its death, underscoring its final unknowability. Transcript renders enclosure. The charcoal seems to capture the last cry of thousands of birds, yet bringing this to the surface requires a human system of signs. The triptych remains silent, pointing only to what is, or was, on the far side of signs. This play with silence is grounded in experience. In a recent podcast conversation, the artist described the oppressive hush of the burned forest. Landscape attempts to expel that silence. It replaces absence with a constructed presence. Birds cannot escape fires of this magnitude. In Landscape, the distortion of birdsong into something else registers the encounter between habitual sound and anthropogenic force. Song merges with fire and becomes incipient noise, a final, alien hybrid of machine and bird. The lack of precedent reveals that the everyday bird sounds we know are themselves strange.
Landscape also shows fire as a system that breaks open and rearranges everything, preserving the alterity of nonhuman life in forms that remain unknowable. It is as if the fire releases the innate screams of living things only to lock them again, like combustion products, forever. The bird calls visualized in Transcript seem to slip free of universal silence, yet soundlessly. Landscape is most powerful when the recording stops and we remain in the gallery, facing the rendered yet unknowable traces of birdsong.
