Goldenroach Exhibition

Goldenroach Unlimited Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle

1st legal exhibition

Curator: Gabriella Zsinka

In what is a surprise domestic stage in visual artist kissmiklos’s action series, M0, Műcsarnok’s project gallery gives home to the installation entitled Goldenroach Unlimited. The exhibition-goers of other countries have had a chance to encounter the insects of the Goldenroach project, which Kiss smuggled into prestigious exhibition halls across Europe, since 2011. The artist also made certain to fit the insects that found their ways into the MuMoK (Vienna), the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Modern (London), the Louvre and the Centre George Pompidou (Paris), or the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), with display labels that matched the look of the current exhibit, making the uninvited guests part of the displays. Later he would plant, in a similar manner, his goldenroach-based souvenirs in the museum gift shops.

Smuggled into the international temples of art, kissmiklos’s goldenroaches are temporarily “deified”, as were scarabs in Egyptianculture. By contrast, the fake gold cockroaches in Műcsarnok, made from injection moulded plastic ( the mould itself being handmade), seem to lack any originality and majesty, like all other cheap, mass-produced figurines of the toy industry, even tough these bear a striking resemblance to their golden counterpart.

Gathering in the middle of the hall, and counting more than ten thousand, this army of insects also attests to the power of organization and representation. While in the foreign galleries the roach, i.e. the artist, seeks to avoid the attention of security guards and cameras, the golden cockroaches are now the very subject of the exhibit in M0—as legal occupants, their identity and deification are put into question. They are centre stage now, and a live stream will allow anyone to follow their fate round the clock.

The artist will soon continue the action series he started three years ago in overseas locations.

"This is an art movement during which I have smuggled in 14 carat gold plated bronze roaches into the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, British Museum, MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) and Hamburger Bahnhof, making them part of current exhibition, in June 2011. The young artist gets into the sanctuary of visual arts like a cockroach. The roach as a carrier of the message is not a random choice, and naturally the used material itself has multiple symbolic values. The roach is one of the most disgusting insects, which is capable of getting inside anything, and also earned a doubled fame in public awareness by its imperishability. People treat the roach as a synonym for disgust because of the common repugnance it causes, but at the same time, as an insect which is capable of adapting the most extreme situations, it is a symbol of survival. Naturally, other insects from the history of art also act in a live picture about my work, for example the scarab from Egyptian culture, where it is showed as a godly symbol, and therefore it is mainly made of gold. But, for my ideas an insect of the opposite meaning was more suitable. This is why I chose the roach at the end. It is found anywhere in the World, considered everywhere as a pest and a source of infections, and exterminated anywhere possible. Opposite to this, the roaches in my creations go through multiple changes. Walking into the culture’s holy space, they turn to gold in the museums, which represent art, and this pushes the question of art. At this point the action is made classic and contemporary at the same time."