Monthly Archive: October 2010

Institutions

The two most weighty Hungarian contemporary art institutions, M?csarnok (Kunsthalle) and the Ludwig Museum Budapest have gone through significant changes during the last couple of years, in terms of both  their institutional structures and exhibition policies. M?csarnok-founded in 1877, opened in 1896, and still utilizing its original exhibition space-follows the model of the German Kunsthallen. Since 2007, after a long period as a state funded institution, it has been a non-profit, limited liability company with two external exhibition spaces; the Ernst Museum and the Dorottya Gallery (director, Zsolt Petrányi since 2006).

The Ludwig Museum, officially founded in 1996, but … Read more

“Where are the women artists of Venice?” asked the Guerilla Girls in 2005. After investigating the ratio of woman artists exhibited in the most famous Venetian museum collections, they concluded that they are “underneath the men.” They communicated this in a humorous way on one of their posters exhibited at the Venice Biennale, placed above the following data: “of more than 1,238 artworks currently on view inthe major museums of Venice, fewer than 40 are by women.” Even earlier, the Guerilla Girls concluded that the situation in Europe is worse than in the United States (“It’s even worse in Europe,” … Read more

In 2007, at the Venice Biennial, Andreas Fogarasi’s Kultur und Freizeit (curated by Katalin Timár) received the Golden Lion award for the best national pavilion. The work dealt with the socialist cultural houses and remnants of socialism in a video installation. Fogarasi is Hungarian, based in Vienna and in his early thirties. According to a logic typical of secondary memory or “post-memory”, this young artist “remembered” something of which he had little or no first-hand experience, partly because of his age and partly because of his location, geographically close but mentally far from socialist Hungary.

According to Piotr Piotrowski , … Read more