Hajnal Németh graduated from the Intermedia Department at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2000, although prior to this she had already participated in numerous international and national exhibitions with her videos, photographs, installations etc. All her commentators agree that the most conspicuous aspect of her visual language is its “Present Continuous Tense”; that her motifs would always reflect on the actual state of contemporary design, fashion, music and art. Yet, when we have a closer look at these motifs, it becomes obvious that her work revolves around the idea of fragmentation, i.e. the disrupted character of her motifs and visual signs is the result of the “loss of perceptual coordinates”. In many of her works this is grasped in terms of gender. The disruption of signs entails in turn the disruption of the possibility of identification on the part of the spectators with the signs (characters) of these works. Thus Hajnal Németh’s artistic activity can also be understood as a critique of Hollywood-type image production and mass culture.
In the second part of the exhibition period, the new work produced in the framework of the project room’s residency programme will be on display. This piece is to be a kind of “monument”, an hommage to five Berlin-based MCs (“Masters of Ceremony”) in the form of an installation of small size sculptures, combined with sound. In the contemporary urban music scene MCs represent a critical voice, they are a kind of “urban folk musicians” and musical representatives of certain subcultures creating identities for members of these subcultures. The activities of these MCs, working in one of the leading centres of contemporary music and club-culture, Berlin, represent the complexity and multi-faceted character of the local communities of the city. And it is also Berlin where Hajnal Németh has been living for two years now.
