CURATOR OF THE INTERNATIONAL THEMATIC BOOTH AT BUDAPEST CONTEMPORARY, September 24-28, 2025. Bálna, Budapest.

“There are 5.000.000.000 great excellent artists in today’s  encyclopedia of the world. There they sit, isolated in alphabetical order. They don’t know each other. They don’t speak to each other.”

The starting point of this year’s International Booth at Budapest Contemporary was Géza Perneczky’s 1982 conceptual work Isolated, which—contrary to the work’s own formulation—aims to emphasize the intersections through which artists in the global world come into contact with one another.

Among the twenty artists presented by ten Hungarian galleries, many emigrated from Hungary and met each other in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, New York, or London. However, across multiple generations and working in diverse media, numerous points of connection can be detected: transitions, repetitions, and abstract motifs in which the experience of separation from one’s old environment, the sense of a new home, the changing forms of the body and the individual, the archaeology of the city and the nostalgia of the present, as well as the motifs of a rapidly changing world and the advances of technology reappear.

Exhibited artists: Carlos Aires, Marianne Csáky, Delaine Le Bas, Alexandra Dementieva, Márton Dés, Agnes Denes, Orshi Drozdik, Andreas Fogarasi, János Fodor, Márk Fridvalszki, Robert Gabris, Rita Koszorús, Michael Lafleur & Tom Bogaert, Radenko Milak & Roman Uranjek, Anna Mark, Vera Molnar, Sonia Navarro, Selma Selman, Júlia Standovár, Dafna Talmor, Andreas Werner.

PHOTO: David Biro, Endre Grandvolt.