Planetarische Bauern

The presentation of images of agriculture collected by the Hungarian artist Tamás Kaszás (born 1976) can be divided into two categories: historical images reworked (from art history to propaganda to product packaging) and new paintings and collages. The latter can further be divided into critical images, which expose the fundamentally destructive ways in which we produce our food (monoculture, overuse of soil and toxins...) and parallel the representations of these harmful extraction technologies with social problems of oppression and inequality. And good examples: futuristic images of sustainable ways of working the land that revive ancient ways of respectful agriculture. All the images oscillate between idealised depictions of heroic peasants, feeding the world through their work, and images of sorrow, portraying peasants as human forms of pure suffering. The installation can be seen as an educational vehicle for a new beginning, telling the story of agriculture to a small group of future apocalyptic survivors as a utopian scenario.