Society Kept in Check, 1995
Mixed media installation. Painted plaster, acrylic, hand-laminated archival paper box – 65 × 395 × 395 mm (board), 20 × 20 × 30–50 mm (figures), 170 × 250 × 250 mm (box)
Bónyai Barbara’s Society Kept in Check is a hybrid installation that traverses the boundaries of game, sculpture, and social allegory. At first glance, it presents itself as a functional chess set: a 64-square board carved from plaster and painted by hand, accompanied by 32 diminutive plaster figures in black and white. Yet none of these figures conform to the archetypal iconography of traditional chess. Instead, each piece is a grotesquely expressive miniature head-autonomous sculptural entities that embody a spectrum of distorted human conditions, psychological states, and archetypes.
The work emerges from Bónyai’s Tardigrades Cycle (1994–1996), a formative period in which the artist explored primal corporeality, trauma, and non-verbal expressivity through drawing, sculpture, and performance. In this context, Society Kept in Check may be seen as both a microcosmic social theatre and a topography of the psyche, where the ordered logic of the chessboard collides with an irrational and emotionally overcharged cast of characters.
The installation exploits the tension between utilitarian object and artistic artifact. Though structurally playable – and reportedly used as such by its current private collector – the true power of the piece lies in its symbolic density. The chessboard becomes a stage for anthropological theatre, enacting a drama of distorted social roles and inner contradictions. Each grotesque face suggests a type: aggression, anxiety, narcissism, inertia. The figures refuse to comply with the rules of the game; they operate according to their own logic, highlighting the dissonance between systemic control and individual deviance.
Formally, the work embraces raw surfaces, disproportionate volumes, and caricature-like details, aligning it with outsider or instinctive art traditions. The binary black-and-white color scheme transcends the logic of gameplay to evoke broader sociocultural and moral polarities – order and chaos, repression and resistance, control and impulse.
The irony embedded in the title – Society Kept in Check – is deliberate. Chess, often celebrated as the pinnacle of rational strategy and hierarchical order, is here subverted by the irrational, the emotive, and the grotesque. The figures are misfits within the system, unsettling the very premise of rules-based play. This destabilization serves as a metaphor for the tension between conformity and deviation, institutional power and subjective experience, collective identity and fractured selfhood.
The custom-made archival box that houses the work is not merely a container but an integral part of the installation. Its function as a storage unit alludes to museological practices of classification and control-rendering the piece not just a game and a sculpture, but also an object of containment, concealment, and perhaps futility.
Society Kept in Check resists fixed interpretation. It is simultaneously a darkly humorous game, a sculptural study in human distortion, and a poignant social commentary. It invites the viewer to engage not only visually but also tactically, yet only at the price of entering an unsettlingly subjective battlefield-one where the boundaries between player, piece, and rule are in perpetual flux.