At the exhibition in Pisztori Palace, Ján Ballx presents his current work, which emerges from the tension between the image and what the image is unable—or refuses—to make present.
In the Ancient Greek tradition, the pharmakos gathers the guilt and impurity of the community and is sacrificed or expelled in order to cleanse the city. It thus becomes both the city’s illness and its cure.
Ballx’s works examine radical ethics, inequality, and the experience of exclusion through the figure of the Other. Rather than treating the Other as an object of knowledge or representation, the works approach alterity as that which resists assimilation and calls the self into question. The encounter with the Other is therefore not a symmetrical exchange between two self-contained subjects, but an asymmetrical relation grounded in an irreducible responsibility to the Other.