(Probably) the Smallest Gallery in the World
Time Out Budapest (May 2010)

It is hard to resist the pull of the Major Spaces, with their merry-go-round of budding stars, market values, glossy press packs and VIP openings, all made possible by an impressive infrastructure of brightly-lit spaces, cavernous storage areas, pokey curatorial offices and bored attendants. But could it be that bigger and more, does not always mean better?...(more) 

Hajnal Nemeth Crash - Passive Interview
Time Out Budapest (March 2010)

Crash – Passive Interview touches on the indeterminateness of individual destiny, the insight brought by near death experience, as well as the unsustainability of modern civilisation’s love-affair with fast cars, of which the manly BMW brand and the unrestricted speeds of the German autobahn are a potent symbol.  In one sense, the installation can be seen as an ultra-advanced road safety informational, while more metaphorically the work resonates with the experience and anticipation of ‘crash’ in everything from economic meltdown to ecological disaster and the emotional turmoil of human relationships...(more)   

The Authentic Glenn Brown
Time Out Budapest (February 2010)

Glenn Brown is what is known in the trade as a second generation appropriationist, meaning that he borrows freely from the storehouse of art history, plundering images of other people’s art and giving them an unexpected twist. While the New York appropriationists of the early 80s were motivated by a desire to politically criticise the canonical works they copied, Glen Brown piles on the layers of bare-faced bootlegging, deft pop references and slick touches of originality so thickly, that his ultimate intentions remain indecipherable...(more)

Transitland: Video Art from East and Central Europe
Time Out Budapest (January 2010)

Opening two weeks after the second post-communist decade officially ended, Transitland is a late arrival at the bitter-sweet party of reminiscence and reflection on the twentieth anniversary of 1989. Parallel to the revolutionary political changes of the perestroika era, 1989 was also a turning point in the history of video art in Eastern Europe, with ex-Bloc artists quick to explore the communicative possibilities of a cheap, censor-proof and accessible medium. The result of an EU-style collaborative international project, Transitland presents the rapid development of the video genre in the region from an archive of 100 key works by artists from twenty-five countries...(more)

Check Mate in Vienna
Time Out Budapest (December 2009)

Ten years on from After the Wall, the groundbreaking exhibition that shaped our understanding of East European art in the first post-communist decade, many of the original players are back in MUMOK in a poignant rerun of the original show. Curated by Berlin-based art historian Bojana Pejić, who was also the co-curator of the 1999 exhibition, Gender Check takes a flexible reading of gender theory as a guide to the legacy of East and Central European art since the 1960s. Gender Check is a very large show, made up of 400 works by over 200 artists in all possible media, and is thankfully organised chronologically as well as thematically, starting with the female heroes of Soviet labour in Socialist Realism, moving up through the 1970s photography of orgasms, to contemporary works that combine sex, capitalism and pornography...(more) 

Upstairs, Downstairs at Budapest Kunsthalle
Time Out Budapest (November 2009)

Currently the cavernous main galleries of the Műcsarnok are given over to the solo show of an Austrian in his 30s, while hidden away in the basement project space is the exhibition of a mid-generation Hungarian artist. Although very different in scale, the two exhibitions make an interesting pairing, as they share a fascination with squirming bodies, tortured relationships and the fetish of the domestic interior. Salzburg-based artist Markus Schinwald has expanded his multi-disciplinary oeuvre of sculpture, painting, video and installation in a largely successful attempt to fill the vast upstairs rooms, while Zsolt Keserue has pushed the limited possibilities of the Menű Pont space to the maximum, to produce an intense and conceptually-focussed video installation..(more)

Hyped, Fresh and Alternative
Time Out Budapest (September 2009)

Hard on the heels of the Derkovits Prize summer show at the Ernst Museum, this month there are three more good opportunities to encounter the latest achievements of Hungarian art. The Műcsarnok opens its autumn season with an exhibition of the work of six contestants for a new Hungarian contemporary art competition modelled on the UK’s much-hyped Turner Prize. A jury of prominent art critics has each picked an artist under 40 with a recent major solo show under their belt as their candidate for the 5 million forint prize, with the winner to be announced in a ceremony at the closing of the exhibition. The public also has the opportunity to vote for their choice of best artist for the more modest audience prize, as part of the overall scheme to stimulate public interest in contemporary Hungarian art and its leading personalities...(more)

Degrees of Modernity
Exindex (April 2009)

Reviews three exhibitions dealing with the phenomenon of national representation within a globalised art context. Arctic Hysteria is a show of Finnish art curated for an international audience, Mi Vida is an exhibition based on a Spanish collection of international art, while Altermodern is the 2009 edition of the British art triennial that trespasses national borders...(more)

The Exclusive World of Art Power
Zivot umjetnosti: journal for contemporary art no.83

Sarah Thorton: Seven Days in the Art World Granta, London, 2008. Boris Groys: Art Power MIT, Cambridge MA, 2008

What these two recent books have in common is that they both set out to reveal the inner mechanisms and driving forces of the contemporary art world. While one author places the art world squarely within the arena of rampant liberal capitalism, the other positions it within the contradictory frame of post-communism. In one account the market reigns all powerful, while the other acknowledges the possibility of a position outside the rules of the market, represented by historical and contemporary forms of ‘propaganda art’. The author of Art Power is maverick art theorist Boris Groys, while Seven Days in the Art World was written by self-appointed anthropologist of the international art scene, Sarah Thornton, and despite the differences, they both provide provocative insights into the internal power relations of the art world...(more)

Vacuum Noise
IDEA (Summer 2009)

Vacuum Noise plunges in with the alluring question ‘has the working class gone to heaven?’, soliciting the response of leading contemporary artists to the legacy of twenty years of global capitalism in the East and South. The exhibition, curated by Nikolett Erőss, seeks to examine the renewed visibility of the industrial worker as victim of the intensive global capitalist strategy of seeking out cheap labour anywhere in the world and the human cost of rolling factory closures. The ever-flexible Trafó Galeria space was decked out in subdued industrial grey for the occasion, with low walls used to produce cubicles that are reminiscent of the monotonous sub-divisions of factory space. The installation creates a serious and challenging setting to absorb six works that broach the massive subject of the real lives and fictional representation of workers...(more)

Venice Biennial
Time Out Budapest (July 2009)

The major exhibition at the Venice Biennial is curated by Daniel Birnbaum, an art world celebrity famous for his hard-edged philosophical approach to contemporary art, who on this occasion went for safe choices in an elegantly installed exhibition that offers few surprises. Making Worlds aims for gravity with the inclusion of the best known artists from the Sixties, here turned into the great predecessors of the younger generation of art superstars. Yoko Ono shared a life-time achievement award with John Baldassari, the American conceptual artist, whose huge banner reading ‘I will not make any more boring art’ confuses tourists on the Grand Canal...(more)

Hungary is searching for a star
Time Out Budapest (June 2009)

Romania has Mircea Cantor and Dan Perjovschi, Bulgaria Netko Solakov, while Albania boasts a trio of big names: Anri Sala, Adrian Paci and Sislej Xhafa. High up to the north east of the old Iron Curtain the Lithuanians have Deimantas Narkevicius, while Polish flags are raised with Pawel Althamer and Zofia Kulik, the Czechs have Katerina Šeda, the Slovak’s Roman Ondak, and Croatia is represented by Mladen Stilinović and Sanja Iveković. Slovenia is a special case, as 90% of their artists are world famous. But what’s up with Hungary, where is the Hungarian art star shining in the cosmos of the international art scene?...(more)

Arctic Hysteria
Timeout Budapest (Feb 2009)

After a successful run at PS1 Gallery, the influential off-shoot of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it was dubbed a ‘surprise sleeper’ by art critics for provoking more interest than national survey shows from small nations usually do, Arctic Hysteria has now infected Budapest.  The Finnish partner in this curatorial joint venture, Marketta Seppälä, explains that since ‘Finns are born in snow, live in snow, and die in snow’ they have a deep relationship to the natural world. The picture that emerges from this ambitious exhibition is therefore not a distillation of Finnishness, but represents instead an understanding that human culture is part of the ‘cycles of nature’.  The American co-curator of the show, Alanna Heiss, who is also the director of PS1 Gallery, introduces the concept of ‘arctic hysteria’ in more personal and anecdotal terms. Although in some ways ‘too important and too old’ to undertake a survey of young artists, thanks to a ‘complete blood transfusion’ in Helsinki some years ago she feels a special kinship with Finland, because the ‘pure Finnish blood’ coursing through her veins provides her with ‘unique insight into this mysterious and beautiful country.’...(more)

Three Colours Red
Exindex September 2008

Miklós Erhardt, Thomas Hirschhorn and Isa Rosenberger at Vienna Secession July-September 2008

‘Seeing a long way into the West’

Austrian artist Isa Rosenberger’s exhibition at Secession consists of a series of projects that reflect on the socialist past in Eastern Europe. Her socially-engaged film, A Monument for the Women’s Centre (2006) focuses on the lives of women who are former employees of a defunct DDR chemical factory and their attempt to combat the media image of East German women as victims of the transition by creating a contemporary monument. Speaking in the distanced tone of the specialist, the artist poses a series of direct questions to the women, such as ‘Why are you a double loser?’

Manifesta Reaches New Heights
Exindex (Aug 2008)

Under the auspicious motto ‘It’s happening’, Manifesta 7 boldly opened to the public this July in the mountainous Italian regions of Trentino and South Tyrol. This most diffuse edition of the European biennial takes place in four locations that are more than 100 km apart, and situated along a historic route connecting the Roman and Germanic worlds. Highest up the Alps lies Fortezza, a colossal Habsburg fortification and the only place where all the Manifesta curators undertook a joint venture. The other three venues were awarded to individual curatorial teams, Bolzano went to the Raqs Media Collective, Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg got Trento and Adam Budak was stationed in Rovereto, together they invited more than 180 artists to participate. The large number of curators, artists and venues might speak about the ambition to reconnect with the previous series of successful Manifesta shows and at the same time overshadow the last minute cancellation of Manifesta 6 in Cyprus two years ago...(more)

European Biennial in Search of a Soul
Art Monthly (Aug 2008)

The organisers of this year’s Manifesta can breathe a collective sigh of relief that the seventh edition of the European biennial of contemporary art is actually happening. After the trauma of the eleventh hour cancellation of Manifesta 6 in Cyprus due to an eruption of local sensitivities, it is somewhat of a miracle that the biennial is back from the brink. Beyond just happening, Manifesta 7, which takes place in the mountainous Italian provinces of Trentino and South Tyrol, is an attempt to return to the spiritual roots and sense of mission of the ‘Manifesta Decade’ and restore its tarnished credibility. Manifesta 7 steers well clear of politics, which is understandable given that the curatorial desire to foster peace between Turkish and Greek Cypriots in Nicosia backfired so disastrously. Consequently, the concepts of the four exhibitions that make up the Biennial, curated by Adam Budak, Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg, and the Raqs Media Collective, deal with abstract notions of regionalism, European identity and the residues of industrial culture...(more)

Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution:
Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century
Art Monthly (May 2008)

The theoretical basis for Art and Revolution comes from the distillation of the core elements of Hardt and Negri’s post-Marxist epic Empire, an essential reference point in current discussions of the revolutionary potential of contemporary art. Revolution should be understood not as a ‘one dimensional attempt to take over the state apparatus’, but rather as a triad of ‘insurrection, resistance and constituent power’. Gerald Raunig takes issue with celebrity theorist Slavoj Žižek’s mischievous campaign to rehabilitate Lenin and the tactics of the October Revolution, which throws a Bolshevik spanner in the smooth, tripartite ‘revolutionary machine’ theorised by Hardt and Negri. Art and Revolution is a considered intervention in the delicately poised debate on the relevance of post-Fordist theory to art by a Viennese philosopher who is himself a leading figure in the field...(more)