Abstract

People collect for various reasons. Distinctly individual and assembled over the course of time, collections can be read as an autobiography of the collector's life. In the realm of artistic practice, the employment of such an accumulation of objects and its manipulation can serve to explore the ways in which the artist constructs an identity and defines a practice within a given political and social context. This thesis will focus on one work by Hungarian-Canadian artist George Legrady entitled An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War (1994) featuring a collection devoted to his family's experience of escape from Hungary during the 1956 Revolution, their subsequent immigration to Canada and the artist's negotiation between the two cultures. Viewed collectively, this becomes a monument to the life of an individual whose history and identity were shaped by political events of the Cold War. In the form of an interactive CD-ROM, we are invited to explore this collection contained in eight rooms set on the floor plan of the former Hungarian Worker's Museum in Budapest. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)