Eternal Flame, 2024
3D printed PLA, transparent stereolithography print with colour pigments
dimensions variable

The installation Eternal Flame evokes the spirit of Bolla’s other grandmother through her room, or rather the artist’s gloomy childhood memoryscape of it. The piano that once stood in the room with a set of wooden doll furniture on the top of it created manually by her great-grandfather was accurately 3D modelled in a lengthy process as a work of mourning and finally materialized as semitransparent, ghostly stereolithographic photo- sculptures. The title of the installation refers to a symbolic memory when her grandmother locked the child Bolla into this room, where she sang Eternal Flame by The Bangles and Viva Forever by the Spice Girls over and over again to kill time. Uncannily, both pop songs happen to thematize the concepts of eternal life and an endless present. In accordance with that, the installation both evokes the primal belief that our soul will live even if our body is dead, but also the converse concept by Erich Fromm, according to which “depression (...) is the sense of being dead, while our body is alive.”)4 The piano fragments are standing in the exhibition space as blackened columns of the eternal flame as well as tombstones, at the same time providing a pedestal to the spectral copies of the furniture-sculptures in the place of candles, oscillating between game and reality, materiality and immateriality, this life and the afterlife.

Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács