There are few oeuvres in Hungary that would be so carefully crafted, so reliable in quality, as Márton Perlaki’s. Its most recent chapter is his return to home turf with an exhibition at Trafó Gallery, a selection of works created since his last display in Hungary—new developments in the artist’s unwavering work.
Szabolcs Barakonyi’s series, Thin Air, can be seen at two venues at the same time, at B24 Gallery in Debrecen, and at Deák Erika Gallery in Budapest. As the subtitle of B24’s show indicates, this is a work from the domain of forensic aesthetics —and that is no empty embellishment.
With Passport, Gáspár Riskó has created a remarkable photo book. Published in 500 copies by the Swiss Innen, the book comprises 114 pages of images, without any written explanation.
Péter Puklus is known to think in series that are not unlike novels or epics—they are long, extensive, and often take years to complete. The final form these series usually take is a publication, a photo book.
This exhibition at Studio Gallery, the venue of the Studio of Young Artists’ Association (FKSE), would not seem out of place in a similarly specced space in Prague, Vienna or Berlin, while its subject is very accessible for anyone familiar with virtual interfaces and images.
Last autumn the Hungarian National Gallery held its first contemporary pop-up exhibition, linked to the temporary exhibitions. This summer saw the opening of the third part of the thematic series, the pop-up exhibition Camera Lucida, accompanying the Fortepan photography exhibition Every Past is My Past.
Depicting the different stages of various actions, the photos are taken out of context by Ruth van Beek, and grouped according to her own subjective aspects, mainly along the lines of iconographic or visual associations.
Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s latest work, Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back strikes multiple chords in diverse registers in an unusually concentrated and complex manner, offering a tragic, comical, poetic, vulgar, objective, heart-wrenching, shocking and disgusting, to put it simply, dense description of motherhood, or more precisely, the initial stage of motherhood as she experienced it.
The show Furnishing the Meaning presented seemingly quite a different series of photographs by three young artists in one space.
Kessels is considered a real superstar in the field of found photography; in the past years, he has had shows at the most important exhibition venues and art festivals in Europe and all over the world, where he presented his series and the more than 60 publications he compiled of them.
On 1 May 2019 (Labour Day), Zsombor Pólya lay in the sun for a full hour at an art camp. In itself, this was a private deed rather than a piece of news or an event within the art circle.
The exhibition titled Ag provided a novel interpretative framework for Dobokay’s work by offering a reflective approach to the knowledge cycle.
Fortepan was the name of a type of negative film manufactured by a state-owned enterprise that came into being through the nationalisation of the former Kodak factory in Vác. It is also the name chosen by the online archive, which has been accessible since August 2010 and which now has 114,810 categorised and searchable keywords.
Gábor Gerhes is like the Bibliographic Institute of Brussels: he adds to the (epistemological) chaos, as there is nothing else he can do, he sees no way out, not even a tiny hole through which he could get a glimpse of reality, the splendid world of permanently established cardinal meanings where nothing is false and everything is true.
Published a few weeks ago, Csilla Klenyánszki’s book Pillars of Home is about these very interactions as well as the role of people in the system of objects.