In 2009, London-based Lang took up an artist's residency in Budapest’s Memento Sculpture Park (a resting place for discarded monumental sculptural works that were ripped down after communism fell in Hungary). While there she integrated life-size cast figures into the original bronze sculptures scattered about the park, forming what the artist refers to as ‘interventions’. These altered statues were were then photographed to produce wonderfully confusing and contemplative images. The mischievous positioning of the inserted figures throws into juxtaposition the life-size and the monumental and the (convincingly) animate and inanimate, forcing you to re-examine these historical relics in a new context. Some interventions add humour; others are subtler, adding tenderness and a touch of humanity. The female figure cradled across a handshake in in ‘Support Group’ below, entirely changes how we see what is otherwise a stern and masculine gesture. 

As all 42 sculptures in the park are male and all of Lang’s figures female, I wondered if she had consciously decided to address feminist issues. When I put the question to her, she said that as a was female artist this was perhaps inescapable. She explained that it was a deliberate decision to introduce women who were very non-heroic and vulnerable, thereby heightening the contrast between intervention and statue.

During the interview I had the chance to further probe Lang’s motivations behind ‘Monumental Misconceptions’. Far from setting out to criticise communism, the artist was interested in raising the question of how context and history can influence our perception. Lang strongly believes that all art is made under the constraints dictated by the time it is made in; the constraints peculiar to Soviet-era sculpture are obvious, but she argues that there is no such thing as absolute artistic freedom even in today’s democracies. So, what then happens to an artwork's meaning once its original context has receded to the distant path? Should our treatment of it change? Lang’s work aims to set the viewer’s mind ticking along these lines, while bestowing a new context on the original Soviet sculptures. 

An echo of these ideas can be found in a quote from Budapest’s Memento Sculpture Park’s architect and founder, Akos Eleod: ‘This park is about dictatorship, but as soon as it has been talked about, described and built, it is already about democracy. After all, only democracy can provide the opportunity for us to think freely about dictatorship, or about democracy, come to that, or about anything.’

All images are courtesy of the artist. A book based around Monumental Misconceptions titled ‘Amnesiac Patina’ will be available from 18th July 2014, and works from the series are currently on show at the Musee Beaux Arts Calais.