Jaro Varga
In Someone Else's Diary
2023
site specific installation, drawings
photo: Moritz Schermbach and artist archive
Serving as a personal diary, these drawings poetically reference and engage with the ongoing conversations surrounding queerness in the present day. Through delicate strokes and signs, they intertwine Jaro Varga's childhood imaginings of the Wild West with an exploration of the gay cowboy narrative, drawing inspiration from Patricia Nell Warren's groundbreaking novels. Constructed as a visual dialogue that recalls the artist's journey through California last year, this drawing series invites viewers to reflect on their own experiences and perceptions, encouraging contemplation of the intricate dynamics that encompass personal identity, representation, stereotypes, and the constantly evolving nature of the queer narrative.
"Jaro Varga looks at the entanglement of knowledge and ignorance: imagination, appositions and references, deeply rooted in the lack of awareness of literature, also literature that shapes him as an artist and a person. Healing may not equal simply erasing the past. Making amends may never mean erasure. Transparent covers that the artist slips onto library books force our gaze to simultaneously embrace two realities: the one we can never deny, as we were (and are) partaking in it, and the one that never had the chance to happen: the world as a whole, which does not happen as an opposition between the object and the subject where [our] relationship with the world is one of appropriation. Frantz Fanon is unequivocally right when he writes that the white civilisation has been built upon this disunity and a suspicion that while it has conquered the world, it has not established a relationship with it. It is this painful place that Jaro Varga reaches for: bonds never struck, absences and the ringing silence where knowledge about the world is always white.” (Agnieszka Kilian)