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.

Markus Schinwald’s Pocket History presents a series of staged scenes in various media that emphasize the potential for weirdness of the contorted and deformed human body. A wooden man sits on the floor of an otherwise empty room with ticker tape spewing slowing out of his mouth, while in the back hall another figure stands alone with a hammer suspended inside his torso. An artificial wall houses a collection of historicist portraits whose sitters all have strange additions or modifications that are impossible to identify, though clearly perverse. The projected films include one featuring a gang of singing Victorian urchins following a pied-piper marionette with a rotating wooden face though an incongruous modern environment, and another in which a woman appears to simulate an epileptic fit in a grand baroque hall.

As is perhaps inevitable in such a large show with so much new work, some of the pieces are more compelling than others. In one room there’s a complex installation with mirror projections in eight small boxes that seems callously designed to frustrate the viewer, who has to run from one tiny reflected image to another, with little hope of drawing any meaning from the whole. The most characteristic work in the show is Schinwald’s series of photos entitled Contortionists, in which Asian girls are photographed in plush settings with their legs wrapped around their shoulders, such as reclining on a velvet bed reading a book or sprawled on a thick-pile carpet holding the receiver of an old-fashioned dial phone. The artist’s approach is deliberately contrived, using the otherness of grand architectural insides to highlight the alienation of body and mind.

It’s easy to miss the little Menű Pont exhibition space downstairs behind the cafeteria, as there are no bright signs advertising this show, which has even been left off the English language pages of the Műcsarnok website. Zsolt Kerserue’s video installation Target Panic is though well-worth seeking out, for its honest appraisal of male attitudes to relationship breakdown, infidelity and changing gender roles. There’s an architectural plan of a typical small flat on the floor of the gallery and a beige sofa and armchair set in which to watch the relentless but absorbing 37 minute film, complete with English subtitles. The camera slowly pans over the faces of four women sitting silently on the same settee as us, listening to the confessional monologues of four men as they reflect on the failure of their marriages. At one moment, one of the speakers recounts how for Christmas one year he was devastated to get a mug from his wife with the word ‘Apa’ on the front, symbolising his shift in her eyes from ‘man’ to ‘father’, which he experienced as a symbolic turning point in his personal journey from ‘Cassanova’ to ‘Family Man’. The women frown, laugh nervously, and squirm in their seats, as they’re forced to listen to these rarely-voiced and basically tragic man stories.