The first body farm was established by an American forensic anthropologist in 1981, because forensic experts lacked sufficient knowledge of human decomposition processes. The facility, part of the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Center, created suitable conditions for studying bodies – this reserve-like establishment was one of the inspirations for László Győrffy in developing his own Body Farm project. In this vision, “human compost” functions as a life-giving, base substance, while direct contact with the materiality of the earth contributes to the creation of hybrid body-images, "since soil is the flesh of the world which we share with stones, animals and monsters" (Zsolt Miklósvölgyi – Márió Z. Nemes).

Győrffy’s Body Farm emerges as a model of dystopian necro-agrarianism, a fiction that evokes both private and communal gardens, where death is only the beginning: this isolated space becomes a site for cultivating and producing posthuman imaginaries. The plan for the Body Farm cycle was first conceived as early as 2014, and the concept – buried six feet deep and subsequently unearthed multiple times – has continuously seeped into Győrffy’s unfolding artworks. However, it has only now manifested as an independent ensemble in the form of a three-part, non-linear exhibition program, the first act of which takes place in the Attic space on the upper floor of aqb.

Body Farm III (The Legacy) begins with the end of the story. The material of the legacy consists of a recently-discovered fictional collection from an indeterminate temporality, created by an unknown artist for the purpose of documenting the project: the watercolour series Body Farm Doomboard / 24 One-Minute Silences presents the plans of the former Body Farm, while the backbone of the exhibition consists of hand-painted ceramic works, Győrffy’s most extensive sculptural cycle to date. The Body Farm has closed, its inhabitants have vanished, the experiments have been halted; yet the small sculptures and works on paper – functioning as active tombstones – become markers within the private labyrinths of processing loss. Moments of forgetting and remembering, and of beginning anew, emerge as an interplay of melancholic and weird formal relations, in which the artist’s characteristic carnivalesque horror aesthetic incessantly culminates in the silence of abstraction.

László Győrffy: Body Farm III (The Legacy)
Opening: May 14, 2026, 6:00 PM
Opening speech by Sándor Hornyik, art historian, Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
The exhibition is on on view until June 6.

Graphic design: János Borsos
Special thanks to: György Gáspár, György Katus (Katus Art), Várfok Gallery, Gergő Kovách, Baguda Association, Patrick Tayler
The exhibition is realized with the support of the National Cultural Fund (NKA).