Who the hell stole my Sublime! and gave me a magical ​strait jacket instead?​
- Writing, 35 pages

A realization of an absence in my education (namely the concept of Sublime) led me to an 8-month long research trip back to Hungary to interview and consult art professionals in the field about the contemporary understanding of Sublime and its Hungarian counterpart, fenséges. ​​My goal was to map the current discourse about its contemporary concepts within Hungarian art, which proved to be absent. The analysis of Sublime in philosophy of aesthetics and the historical analysis of Hungarian trauma and its effects on the subject lays foundation for the current local point of views gathered from personal interviews, casual conversations, and a roundtable discussion.

The title of this text suggest a frustration and irony; there is no single cause for absences (such this) but repetitive complex ideological manipulations. This writing directs attention to a geopolitically specific microaggression affecting aesthetics.

To understand the significance of this absence, one has to be immersed and nearly choked in the enclosed Hungarian atmosphere, where the normalization of nationalism has resulted in kind of invisible discrimination against anything divergent in thought. State controlled cultural institutions do not give sanctuary for free thought, they operate under the monetary micro control that allow only a slit narrow clearance for advancement.

To represent such repressed conditions structurally, two contrasting personas are created in the text, a superior character of academia challenged by the inferior character of emotion. In between the two, the third character represent the collective voice, which are interviews I collected during the research as my primary source to map out and better understand the current condition of this absence and a concluding question "what is Sublime in Hungary today?" For this question, regardless if artworks were not analyzed as such, what are the tendencies in Hungarian art that might open a new chapter in Sublime discourse?

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Roundtable discussion May 18, 2017
co-organized by FKSE, Studio Association for Young Contemporary Artist and AQB, Art Quarter Budapest.

Interviews and support from: Zsolt K. Horváth, Sándor Hornyik, Edit András, Mesi Mucsi, Józef A Tillmann, Márió Z. Nemes, Márk Horvath, Gergő Pintér, Csuka Botond, Gábor Gerhes, Katalin Timar, Szabolcs Kisspál, Márton Orosz, Tibor Gyenis, Lőrinc Borsos, Márk Fridvalszki, Attila Szűcs, Ferenc Gróf, and the Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest.

The research was supported by many professionals but was also criticized by an esthete, who raised a point: " Isn't there a serious colonial viewpoint in this question?" This is important to clarify, as Sublime is not a new concept or term that is being introduced, but rather an existing term was revisited, that changed over time. It changed to the extreme that conflicting opinions suggests the Hungarian version of the word "fenséges" might or might not be capable to live up to its contemporary connotations. To satisfy my obsession with absence, I was merely interested in why we don't talk about the concept of fenséges from the perspectives of present local concerns. Or simply put, what is the Hungarian non-Classical Sublime and when will we talk about it? Hungarian essays are already written about the Classics and foreign examples of Sublime but perhaps it's beneficial to talk about our own.

Some of the related keywords in my essay are: national trauma, brutal, manipulation, language, autonomy, consciousness, imagination, tendency, contemporary, and agency.