The peculiar existence of Venice is the theme interpreted in the assembled works of Balázs Kicsiny. Instead of the usual national or artistic self-representation, the artist, coming from a sea-less Central European country, comments on the position symbolized by Venice, one which characterises European thinking; the linear approach to space — time and the ideology directed to expansion and progress. It was in Great Britain where Balazs Kicsiny during his stay there, was for the first time faced with the problem represented by a country without sea, and he encountered the cultural background of a western civilization surrounded by water. In consequence he experienced the relations between travelling, shipping, trade, colonization, migration, settling, foreignness, belief, and various layers of time.

The idea of the exhibition is to query our common agreement and approach to space, time and orientation, and the potential representation of this in visual, plastic and spatial terms. The series of objects Kicsiny has applied here, like the anchor, the pyjamas, the cassock, the chain, the trunk, and even the accessories of deep water diving, can be interpreted as a reference to Venice, a utopian city of European cultural history.

The four artefacts of the exhibition entitled An Experiment in Navigation represent the following concepts:
— the paradox of a linear approach to time in The Cobbler's Apprentice
— the paradox of the impossibility of experiencing space objectified in Winterreise
— the negative allegory of the existence of a home in Sweet Home
— the illustration of the controversial nature of profane and sacred aspects of society in Pump Room

The starting point of the exhibition's itinerary is the video work entitled The Cobbler's Apprentice. For the succeeding stations, present layers of time stiffened in motionlessness, the motion picture of the video recording defines and at the same time counterpoints the stillness of the surrounding works. The clock, composed specifically for human figures, indicates the obvious finite-infinite nature of time.

The next station is the first, sizeable room on the left, where one finds Winterreise - a work of art whose concern is orientation, localization, the metaphor of direction and counter direction. It calls one's attention to circumstances in which a fairly large community, in a time when various fundamental changes are taking place, have to face the past and the future. Directions are queried — what is right and what is wrong or what is good and what is bad: it questions even those basic values which have, according to our ideology connected to orientation as such, seemed unquestionable up to now. This work of art symbolizes a situation in which leaving an actually relative coordinate system, one that has always thought to be absolute, where one's skills of orientation and certainty of consciousness are lost. The title comes from Schubert's song cycle entitled Winterreise, the very first line of which goes as follows: "I've arrived as an alien, and now I depart as such."

The formal solution of Sweet Home is associated with the heart of a beehive, and in the middle of the space there stands an archetypal figure representing the traveller. This beehive-headed human figure, wrapped in chains, and dragging along anchors and trunks, is a negative allegory of the evangelic prodigal-son story, of orientation and domestication. All the motifs of this work like the beehives, the anchors or the chains are gathered around the sacred and profane symbols of the notion of journey and home, and represent a series of contradictions such as mobility — immobility, home — homelessness, separation — home-coming, unfamiliarity — familiarity.

Pump Room is a representation of paradoxes and notional allegories. It is a depiction of wakefulness and dream, of vulnerability and immunity, it is the state of being defenceless against the elements, and of being dependent on the water and on the air, and it also embodies the duality of being thrown in the middle of a society and a sense of alienation at the same time — this work is based on the complexity of all these.

The works which Balázs Kicsiny has assembled here under the name of An Experiment in Navigation approach the metaphor of orientation with dramatic iconography.