Interview: Katarina Ševic and Gergely László

I met with artists Katarina Ševic and Gergely László at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin to talk about their project House Museum (2006), developed after being able to return to Ševic’s summer cottage in Žuljana, a small village on the Pelješac Peninsula (Croatia) after the civil war in ex-Yugoslavia (1991-2001). The ethnic conflicts prohibited Ševic, a Serbian citizen, and her family to enter Croatian territory and, therefore, inhabit the house. Thirteen years later, the artist returned and, working collectively with Gergely László, cleaned and repaired the house, left ravaged by war and occupied in her family’s absence. The artists gathered more than 100 objects, employing archeological principles to uncover the past of the house and archive the found objects discovered. The House Museum has been exhibited in the group exhibitions Lost in Transition, CAME, Tallinn (2011); Bunker Design at the Moscow Biennial, Hungarian Cultural Centre, Moscow (2007); and at the Remont Gallery, Belgrade (2007) and the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest (2006).

Katarina Šević (b. 1979, Novi Sad/Serbia) and Gergely László (b. 1979, Budapest) live and work in Budapest and Berlin. Since 2004, Gergely László and Péter Rákosi work collaboratively under the label of Tehnica Schweiz. Šević and László’s other projects include: The Man with an Excavator (2010); The Heroes of the Shaft (2011); Gasium et Circensens (2012); Shifting: Worker Culture and Life Reform in the Madzsar School (2012); and Imperatores Provinciae (2013).