This study explores the possible correlations between the aesthetic procedures of artistic re-enactments as a critical re-translations and performative modes of recontextualizing the events of the past and the mythical narratives/tropes preserved in cultural memory that mainly have been transmitted by literary and visual art history. Th ese practices are still alive today through a contemporary Hungarian artwork, Szabolcs Süli-Zakar’s video installation Sisyphus. The experimental artistic approach shows the myth of Sisyphus, which embodies certain insights of existentialism and the absurd, through reappropriation, becoming a specific metacommentary on aesthetic communication and cognition. It also addresses productive expression and reception, while condemned to eternal repetition and the inaccessibility of transcendental sign and meaning.

This study explores the possible correlations between the aesthetic procedures of artistic re-enactments as a critical re-translations and performative modes of recontextualizing the events of the past and the mythical narratives/tropes preserved in cultural memory that mainly have been transmitted by literary and visual art history. Th ese practices are still alive today through a contemporary Hungarian artwork, Szabolcs Süli-Zakar’s video installation Sisyphus. The experimental artistic approach shows the myth of Sisyphus, which embodies certain insights of existentialism and the absurd, through reappropriation, becoming a specific metacommentary on aesthetic communication and cognition. It also addresses productive expression and reception, while condemned to eternal repetition and the inaccessibility of transcendental sign and meaning.