The Ludwig Museum’s latest temporary exhibition offers the public an opportunity to explore artistic reflections on the concept of transience. The international group exhibition will be open for more than 4 months and features 22 artists from 15 countries.
The exhibition thematizes a temporality in which the dimension of the present is expanded to an extreme. How can we grasp this experience that represents the end of a solid chronological order, the emergence of a transient state, and the preparation for an uncertain future?
This “absence of epoch” – our everydays experienced as in an interim “vacuum” – that characterises our times can also be likened to a prolonged state of transience. The chronology of transitions we are all living now is a special experience, characterised by the emergence of fault lines within homogeneous time.
The concept developed through an experimental working method used the notion of entropy as its initial point of departure to arrive at the exhibition’s theme, the absence of epoch and the contemporary experience of time. The curators’ chosen perspective captures the moment when the temporal dimension of the present expands and – by means of visual art – the characteristics and internal events of this state can be observed up close. Thus, the exhibition presents works that are disruptive and create an opportunity for the viewer to step out of the routine everyday linearity and look out on parallel experiences.
Artists, artist duos and artist collectives from more than fifteen countries often formulate radical visions on the „chronology of transitions”, using a variety of means. Cornelia Parker, who will have a solo show at Tate Britain this spring, will present a complex installation assembled from wooden boards of demolished huts in Canton, China. The Swedish duo Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg create clay puppets, while Nina Canell, another Swedish artist, deals with deep-sea fibre optic cables. The work of Dane Mitchell, who represented New Zealand at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, extends the moment of metamorphosis into the course of the exhibition, through an essence applied to photographic paper. The exhibition also includes most banal objects, from Tsuyoshi Anzai’s kinetic sculptures of household objects that take on a life of their own, to Endre Koronczi’s panel pieces charged with deep sociological and cultural meaning for the Hungarian public.
Extended Present – Transient Realities interprets the experience of permanent transience through the artistic practices of the present. The creative processes presented in the exhibition offer possible alternatives through distinct yet common denominators in the light of our constantly rewritten everydays.
In the preparation of the exhibition, the curators sought to present some of the material outside the walls of the museum, embedded in the fabric of the city – in reference to the extendedness implied by title of the exhibition – so that the site-specific installations, which are an integral part of the concept, also extend the exhibition in space. The planned projects will take place throughout Budapest at various times during the exhibition (from 8th April to 4th September, 2022).
This is not the first time that an international group exhibition offers the visitor the opportunity to explore a cross-section of a sharply defined idea, developed by a curatorial team, which, in terms of its topicality or relevance, goes beyond the curators’ professional and individual concerns, allowing for a multi-layered approach.
Curators: FEIGL Fruzsina, KÁLMÁN Borbála, KÉSZMAN József, MAJ Ajna, TIMÁR Katalin, ÜVEGES Krisztina
Download the exhibition booklet HERE.
