We found the concept and practice of resilience (flexible adaptation to environmental conditions) expressive as a comprehensive-strategic approach to the exhibition year 2022. The exhibitions feature sub-themes that interpret contemporary life as an extended present. Sustainability combined with a resilient attitude is future-proof. An effective means of formulating and delivering valid cultural messages.
{SCRIPT:ABSTRACT} – HERR FREY FREI
21 January – 20. March 2022
Krisztián Frey (1929–1997) is one of the outstanding representatives of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde of the sixties and an early Swiss pioneer of international computer art. With this large-scale oeuvre exhibition, the museum is repaying an old debt. As a member of the Iparterv generation, Frey appeared in the progressive art scene in the early 1960s with an abstract expressionist form of expression he developed. His characteristic expressive abstraction combined with handwriting, called “a gesture painting of variable pace,” covered a wide aesthetic horizon, including white-burnt monochrome paintings, diary-like calligraphies of compulsive handwriting, and a world of stains, graffiti, and digital vectors.
Frey’s oeuvre unfolds in its entirety as it has never been seen before from a selection of works from prestigious museums and works lent by Hungarian and international private collectors, from early works unknown to the profession to masterpieces made in Hungary and Switzerland and to pioneering computer art experiments.
Local Value – A Selection from the New Acquisitions by Ludwig Museum
4 March – 24 April 2022
The exhibition includes works by progressive artists of the neo-avant-garde, as well as conceptual tendencies of the seventies with works never shown before, and the artists of the BOSCH & BOSCH group from Vojvodina, juxtaposed with the activities of the Pécs Workshop. The works of young artists of the painting turn that became more and more prominent at the end of the 2010s are shown in a separate room, and Slovak, Ukrainian, Estonian, Polish, Russian and Albanian artworks are presented in thematic blocks, in comparison with similar Hungarian endeavours.
Works on women’s role models as well as on individual and collective historical memory/traumas, mainly based on photography, will be presented as a separate theme through works by Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian and Russian artists. The (self-)portrait and its absence, the difficulty and loss of “representability” or painterly identification, as well as the position of the artist and art in society, or the disappearance of the traditions of landscape and genre painting, the relationship between the three dimensions and the plane, all form a separate unit.
Extended Present
8 April – 4 September 2022
The exhibition explores the issue of the permanent transience that we experience today, both on a global and personal level. Partly due to technological progress, partly due to the evolution of social and biological systems, not only has the present become unpredictable and uncertain, but the future looms as an apocalyptic endgame. However, transience also holds the potential for choice and change, which can derive its power from the very ground of this prolonged state and creatively mobilise this power. By capturing the present moment and extending it, the works on display offer possible alternatives in the face of our ever-changing everyday lives.
The international group exhibition will use a variety of techniques and media (installation, multimedia) to capture and convey states of transience.
Emplotment
13 May – 28 August 2022
The international group exhibition entitled Emplotment focuses on the reworking and performative representation of trauma sources using the tools of visual art. The exhibit will examine how the role of the artist has changed in recent decades and what new approaches and perspectives have emerged in the field of trauma processing. Although the analysis of the relationship between art and trauma has a long history, the exhibition emphasises the relational aspect beyond the issue of representation and representability.
“I Am Not A Robot” – On the Borders of the Singularity
15 September – 27 November 2022
As a harbinger of the (supposedly) imminent arrival of the Singularity, the exhibition explores the powerful impact of technological development on our daily lives.
One of the defining global phenomena of our time is digitalisation, which has transformed human life in an evolutionary leap over the past decades, rewriting centuries of fixed habits, forms and behavioural patterns. The digital turn is still ongoing, with our lives moving from offline to online, and the digital presence growing rapidly. Digital technology in its current state is a new normativity that is part of work and life: not an enemy, not a friend, but a natural part of life...
Smaller Worlds: Diorama in Contemporary Art
13 October 2022 – 15 January 2023
The diorama and its cousin, the peep-box, take a variety of forms, both in art and in its border areas: from conveying scientific or social messages to pop art and the grotesque. The common feature of the different dioramas is the crossing over into another dimension. Similar to children’s dollhouses, the diorama is an attempt to interpret the unfathomable outside world by reducing it to a manageable size, rendering it harmless and bounded, and bringing it fully under human control.
After Dreams: I Dare to Defy the Damage
Exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale of Fine Arts, Hungarian Pavilion
15 December 2022 – 26 February 2023
This year, the Hungarian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale will feature a solo exhibition by Zsófia Keresztes, entitled After Dreams: I Dare to Defy the Damage, which could perhaps never be more topical than after the pandemic crisis. The exhibition seeks to explore the ambivalent relationship of past and present to the future and the stages of finding identity in four major units. After Venice, the exhibition will be presented in Budapest, as usual.
TIME MACHINE – A NEW SELECTION FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE LUDWIG MUSEUM
1. September, 2020 – 8 January 2023
Time machine is a device that only exists in theory so far, with the help of which we can fly our physical body into the past or the future. The new exhibition at the Ludwig Museum is not about the science-fiction possibility of time travel, but examines the relationship between time and art from different perspectives, and sees the works themselves as time machines that allow us to travel mentally.
