Residency of the American Embassy, Budapest, April – June, 2023
Carrying multiple layers of history, the word ABRACADABRA has been invoked for thousands of years to create magic. The word’s ambiguous origin leads back to magical gems and the Aramaic phrase “I will create as I speak.”
At the Residency of the American Embassy, artists and curators applied ABRACADABRA to express – a art’s genuine ability to transfigure the mundane into magical, the ordinary into festive. The selected artists and their works intend to celebrate this ability by displaying various in-situ installations, small-scale artistic interventions, paintings, and objects reflecting on the spatial and atmospheric qualities of the ambassadorial residence.
ABRACADABRA creates a sphere, where the sublime merges with the banal, and the real melts into phantasmagoria. Within the interior, hierarchies, and hegemonies turnupside-down: the surveillant finds themself under surveillance, the functioning ceases to be functional again and what has been part of every day, now turns into a spectacle. Through hiding and highlighting certain elements of the domestic place, the artists claim the existence of art within all domains. The magic will last until one unveils it, and the trace it leaves behind will exist only in memory.
ABRACADABRA represents a blooming, diverse, and unique couleur locale of the contemporary Hungarian independent art scene and gives an account of the aesthetic and thematic interests of a generation that grew up in an era which promised no limits for imagination.Group exhibition and spatial intervention at the Residency of the American Embassy in Hungary.
Exhibiting artists: PPILLOV V , LŐRINC BORSOS , DOMINIKA TRAPP, GERGŐ SZINYOV A , BOTOND KERESZTES I ,
GZOPÁR CSENGE LIKSAY, CHRISTA BARTESCH, MÁRK FRIDVALSZKI, ERIK MÁTRAI, PÉTER TAMÁS
HALÁSZ.
Curated by: LŐRINC BORSOS, ZSOLT MIKLÓSVÖLGYI, LILI REBEKA TÓTH
Photos: KRISZTINA BILÁK, DÁVID BIRÓ
