Roth and Revelation, 1997

Conceptual performance and its visual traces (watercolour, photography)

Bónyai Barbara’s Roth and Revelation is a radically personal yet philosophically layered conceptual performance that navigates the intersection of hunger, serendipitous encounter, altered states of consciousness, and material decay. Far from the public eye, this performative act unfolded within the intimate setting of everyday life – in a poverty-stricken domestic space where the artist, two friends, and a lone zucchini became the protagonists of a quiet, existential ritual.

The point of departure is a forced, almost absurd culinary failure: a zucchini, poorly prepared and rendered inedible, emerges as a symbol of shared deprivation and the body’s raw physical hunger. Yet the narrative takes an unexpected turn as the participants enter a heightened state of awareness that enables deep conversation, creative ideation, and a sense of transpersonal communion. Physical lack gives way to spiritual saturation, and the rejected food transforms into a relic. Roth and Revelation thus transcends mere event – it becomes a rite of transmutation, in which the banal assumes the sacred, failure becomes monument, and ephemeral time is mythologised.

The performance’s only material remnant – the zucchini preserved in a glass jar – eventually blooms into a lush turquoise mould before becoming hazardous and ultimately discarded. Yet the impulse to preserve is not in vain: the watercolours and photographs born from this episode are not simple documents but contemplative afterimages, carrying forward the aesthetic and philosophical essence of the work. Here, decay is not collapse, but a generative force – an alchemical transformation in which decomposition is the vestibule of revelation.

The title Roth and Revelation resonates with conceptual density, evoking biblical and alchemical traditions in which physical corruption is framed as the precondition of spiritual insight. The performance can be read both as a poetic diary of a young artist’s precarious existence and as a domestic ritual that opens portals to the spiritual dimensions of the everyday.

Bónyai’s work is a rare fusion of raw honesty and symbolic richness, embodying the increasingly significant “life-as-art” sensibility in contemporary practice. Roth and Revelation is not merely the trace of an ephemeral moment – it is the manifesto of a worldview, mapping the journey from material necessity to spiritual abundance, contained within the modest universe of a single glass jar.