András Gálik (b. 1970 in Budapest), Bálint Havas (b. 1971 in Budapest), both live and work in Budapest. Working as a duo since 1999, Little Warsaw addresses historical memory and confronts personal encounters with social experience through films, installations, and a wide variety of media. In recent years, Little Warsaw has undertaken a manifold investigation of the art object as a complex system of codes, conventions and signifiers used as a form of dialogue between the artist and the public. Taking inspiration from similar experiments by the Bauhaus, and reanalysing structuralist theories, they deconstruct the artwork into its most fundamental components: form, colour and material.
One of their best known works is the project The Body of Nerfertiti, presented at the Venice Biennial in 2003, in which they made a bronze body to complete the famous limestone bust of Nefertiti. The act opened up an extremely rich field of associations, including the question concerning the use of the centuries-old iconic art object in contemporary art and the possibilities it offers for intercultural communication, while at the same teasing out the property relations of the artistic heritage of the past.
It is also the artistic heritage of post-war Hungary that they investigate in many of their projects. They elevate public monuments from their environment that have been condemned to amnesia, and use archival footage to place them in a new narrative.