person

1950 –

Hungary

http://www.forgacspeter.hu

Film and video artist. Forgács begun his studies at the Hungarian Academy of Arts in 1971 but was dismissed from the course in the same year for political reasons. He worked at the Béla Balázs Studio from 1978 to 1993. Meanwhile, as recitativo (1978/86) he worked in the contemporary music ensemble Group 180 (180-as Csoport). He gave lectures at several universities' film, history, literature and other faculties. He has made more then thirty films since 1978. He is founder and director of the Private Photo and Film Archive (1983), a unique collection of amateur films. He was interested in documents of the past that could be examined from a sociological and historical point of view, the original way of his archeological research work included using amateur recordings as raw material for his films and installations. In these artworks the "lost and found objects" do not become museum pieces, rather they offer interpretation possibilities, in some cases pointing out contradictions. His documentary film called 'The Bartos Family' won the Grand prize at the World Wide Video Festival -The Hague.(1988). Since then he has won several international festival prizes in Budapest, Lisbon, Marseille and San Francisco. He was awarded the Béla Balázs Award in 1998, the Dutch Erasmus Prize in 2007 for his outstanding cultural work in Europe and the same year the Distinguished Artist Award (Érdemes Művész Díj). In 2009, he was the artist of the Hungarian national Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2011, he received 1st Prize in the documentary category of the Mediawave Festival for his film 'Hunky Blues'. (2016)