The Ludwig Museum Budapest–Museum of Contemporary Art presents the work of the New York based Spanish artist, Antoní Muntadas, first time in Hungary. The exhibition material is based on five already existing works in context of the new works specially made for Budapest. Deconstructing the systems of representation and information that pervade the contemporary media landscape, Muntadas posits a compelling discourse on the “invisible mechanics” that inform the production and reception of mass media texts. Reading “between the lines” to decode the subjective and objective meanings and interpretations of media language and images, Muntadas analyses the consumption of information and the process by which it is mediated and manipulated for power, propaganda and profit. Strategies of fragmentation, decomposition, isolation, reframing, and disintegrating of words and images are integral to his inquiry into how facts and information are mediated or contextualized for the viewer/reader. Deconstructing the form of what he terms “ecology” of the media – cinema and television credits, advertising slogans, the editing of a news story – he deciphers how its ideological content functions in relation to economic, social and political systems. Antoní Muntadas was born in 1942 in Barcelona. He studied architecture at the University of Barcelona and was taught later at the University of California, San Diego; École des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux; M.I.T. Center for Advanced Visual Studies among others. A bilingual (Hungarian-English) catalogue with texts by Katalin Néray, Katalin Tímár, Miklós Peternák and a conversation between Susan Snodgrass and Muntadas will be available.
Curators: Katalin Tímár (guest curator) and Dóra Hegyi
