Ištvan Išt Huzjan is one of the artists of the younger generation whose works are extraordinarily original in form, constantly flirting with the sphere of the ephemeral and thus interrogating the mechanisms and representational sphere of contemporary visual art. Besides that Huzjan attempts to recognize his own childhood, to search for the unconscious, a state of being that, in the artist’s thinking, is one of the crucial engines, one of the crucial sources, of his artistic practice.

The project Revisiting the 1st m2 – which the artist has been working on since 2009 and which is a kind of continuation of his past work – is essentially the same. Here too Huzjan attempts to recognize his own childhood, to search for the unconscious, a state of being that, in the artist’s thinking, is one of the crucial engines, one of the crucial sources, of his artistic practice. At its basis the project is about renting a square meter of public land in various locations in Europe. Each piece of land is a hundred kilometers apart from the next; taken together, they form a straight line from Amsterdam to Ljubljana. In order to rent the land, Huzjan had to travel to the different locations, find the owners, and sign a lease with them for renting the land at no charge; this made it possible for him to mark the selected sites for an agreed period of time. As he himself says, his personal journey through the selected locations occurred in two directions.

The horizontal journey, from west to east, proved to be a kind of sociopolitical study, as along the way the artist was dealing with various histories, laws, and the lives of the people who, willingly or not, became caught up in the project. But what demonstrates the precision of Huzjan’s artistic practice and, in a sense, rounds out the entire project is, certainly, the vertical aspect of his journey, which is again directly involved with the personal sphere. During the time he lived in Amsterdam, Huzjan would make regular trips home to Ljubljana and, on these trips, would always take a subordinate position in relation to the owners of the selected pieces of land. These tireless, long journeys home remind us of Odysseus’s ten-year travels, but at the same time they are an even more powerful testimony to the artist’s emotional capacity and his ability to forge and maintain relationships, whether close, distant, or random.