Tagged: hungary

At the 2007 Venice Biennale, and for the first time in the history of the event, art works produced by Romani artists were displayed in the Roma Pavilion. The exhibition for the first Roma Pavilion, entitled Paradise Lost, was curated by cultural activist and art historian Timea Junghaus. Contemporary artists of Roma descent had the chance to engage artistically and politically with their own identity concerns. Junghaus clearly states in the exhibition catalogue: “a new generation of Roma intellectuals and artists is emerging; along with a new Roma consciousness…The Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale will be the first, internationally … Read more

The Erika Deák gallery was founded in 1998. Before this, Erika Deák lived in the United States for almost a decade. She graduated from Temple University, Philadelphia, and was working in several art galleries in New York City, while writing for different art magazines.

After moving back to Budapest in 1998 she opened her gallery in a small apartment on the third floor of a residential building in Buda. It was one of the first commercial galleries in Budapest. The first exhibit was a collaboration with the Ludwig Museum, Budapest. While the museum exhibited the large-scale installation works of Spanish … Read more

Critical art practices (once also labeled avant-garde) have been playing out their death throes ever more dramatically in recent years.(For a historical and theoretical reconstruction of the death throes of avant-garde art in the 20th century, cf.: Paul Mann, Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).)  On the one hand, this might be so precisely because more and more artists, curators, and collectors have taken an interest in them; but on the other hand, if they do die out definitively, then the real danger exists that there will be no alternative at all to global techno-capitalism … Read more

Participatory art projects are not common in the Hungarian visual art scene. If we see this kind of artistic activity as having something to do with social engagement, it might be easier to understand its rarity. After a rising interest at the turn of the century, only a few artists have continued to develop socially engaged projects in the past few years. The art scene is not receptive to self-restricting artistic activity and autonomy.(See texts on some art collectives of the 1980s and 1990s  (the Újlak Group, Szürenon, INDIGO etc. in IMPEX: We Are Not Ducks on The Pond … Read more

Similar to the country’s system of cultural institutions, the Hungarian museum system is bloated. Budapest is the cultural center of the country, as anything outside its limits is still referred to as provincial. The country’s major art museums with their most important exhibitions, large art schools, journals, artists, and the richest collections are all situated in the capital.

The most serious attempt to decentralize the museum system dates back to before the political transition. However, this was not a once-and-for-all resolution, since the upgrading of rural locations outside of Budapest was actually a project in the works intermittently from the … Read more

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