NEP4DISSENT WG3 and WG6 workshop

NEP4DISSENT (A New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent), organised within the framework of EU COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), is a joint research programme and network involving some 40 countries and 200 research projects. The research is carried out in six working groups.

Several colleagues of Artpool (Flóra Barkóczi, Júlia Klaniczay, Emese Kürti, Zsuzsa László, Kristóf Nagy, Gabriella Schuller) are members of the project and are active in two main working groups: Working Group 3 (Alternative Cultures) and Working Group 6 (Art and Cultural Heritage Curation).

In 2019 Working Group 3 and 6 held a workshop (led by Katalin Cseh and David Crowley) in Artpool during their meeting in Budapest.

The main objective of the meeting and workshops in Budapest was to draw up the "State of the Art Report" which summed up the achievements of the programme and provided the basis for next year’s support. Chapters 3 and 6, which also deal with Artpool, can be found on pages 113-137 and 198-222 of the publication. (download pdf)

Parallel Nonsynchronism International Symposium
Round table discussion: Parallel Institutions

In the late 1960s and early 1970s progressive artists made several attempts to get into state-funded art institutions, however, after failing to do so they established semi-public or fictitious institutions.

Participants in the discussion: Emese Kürti and Zsuzsa László (Artpool), Magdalena Ziółkowska (Warsaw)

Zsuzsa László, Emese Kürti, Magdalena Ziółkowska

Iparterv50+ exhibition
(loaning documents)

ERASMUS+. Art Archives Exchange – Educational Strategies for Contemporary Art Archives

Teaching / Learning / Training Activity workshop week:
working visit by two additional partner institutions participating in the project (basis Wien, Vienna and MNAC, Bucharest) at the Artpool Art Research Center

Participants: basis wien: Andrea Neidhöfer, Marc Paul; MNAC: Cerasela Barbone, Adriana Oprea, Magda Predescu; Artpool: Flóra Barkóczi, Dóra Halasi, Júlia Klaniczay, Emese Kürti, Viktor Kotun, Zsuzsa László, Klaudia Varga

Organisers and facilitators: Flóra Barkóczi and Dóra Halasi

During the five-day workshop the participating archives introduced themselves and primarily familiarised themselves with Artpool’s working methods, collection practices, digitisation methods and the technology used for this. The theoretical part of the workshop focused on the problem of digitisation: the reading list compiled in advance by Flóra Barkóczi and the related questions were discussed in an afternoon ‘reading circle’. The workshop programme also includes visits to two additional archives (the archives of the Lectorate and the Hungarian University of Fine Arts), as well as László Zsuzsa’s guided tour of the exhibition titled Parallel Nonsynchronism.

* The European Commission's support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Zsuzsa László’s study trip supported by the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) programme within the framework of NEP4Dissent (A New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent.

The aim of the research is to process the documentation of the Works and Words exhibition of 1979 in the archive of the De Appel contemporary art institution in Amsterdam, while utilising interviews with local organisers and participants.

Works and Words was a ten-day series of events and an exhibition in 1979 at De Appel in Amsterdam, which presented nearly 70 artists from four Central Eastern European countries (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Hungary). This was one of the most important art events during the Cold War, allowing Western European audiences to learn about artists beyond the Iron Curtain and to familiarise themselves with their works.

Artpool’s concept of “Active Archive”:
A translocal program as networking strategy in the periphery

Flóra Barkóczi’s presentation at the Art in Periphery conference

The three-day international conference – which investigated the relationship between art and the periphery as a tribute to the research work of Portuguese art historian Foteini Vlachou (1975-2017) – was organised by the Institute of Art History and Institute of History of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.

Flóra Barkóczi’s presentation examined the possible reinterpretation of the geopolitically peripheral position by outlining Artpool’s networking activities over the last 40 years. Artpool’s local, Eastern European determination and its illegal operation before the change in the political system created the strategy that resulted in the building of international relations, the dissemination of the information accessible up to then and the stimulation of research along the lines of the ‘active archive’ concept developed by Artpool. In addition to discussing Artpool’s operation before the change in the political system, the presentation also touched upon the operation of the network that was undergoing change in tandem with the emergence of the Internet in the 1990s, as well as the new opportunities created by the integration of Artpool into the Museum of Fine Arts. Artpool’s strategic relationship-building activity was presented based on various theories of determination by peripheral position (Piotr Piotrowski, Foteini Vlachou, etc.).

Experimental Theatres of the Seventies
Presentation by Gabriella Schuller
Within the framework of the Experimental Theatre - Free University series

Gabriella Schuller (photo: Dunszt.sk)

The introductory part of the lecture, held in the series organised by Stúdió K. and Dunszt.sk Free University, was devoted to the cultural opening-up that took place in Hungary in the 1960s, as well as the power techniques of regulating theatre life. The audience was then acquainted with the history and aesthetics of the experimental theatres that grew out of the amateur theatre movement, especially the apartment theatre in Dohány Street and the István Kovács Studio, managed by László Najmányi.

After the presentation, some directors (Attila Antal, Martin Boross, Miklós Forgács, Veronika Szabó) discussed the possible interpretations of ‘experimental’ and ‘experimental theatre’ in the world of contemporary theatre.

Feel Honoured. Ágnes Eperjesi’s exhibition
(loaning photographs and video)

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Invitation for Ágnes Eperjesi’s exhibition. Opening: 14 May 2019, 6 p.m. Exhibition opened by Luca Adamik.
Fészek Artists’ Club: Budapest, 1073, Kertész u. 36. Exhibition open from 15 May to 14 June 2019

“If theory is not enough.”
Selection from the Labor Fanzine Collection exhibition
(loaning photographs)

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Art Archives Exchange – Educational Strategies for Contemporary Art Archives Teaching/Learning/Training Activity - ERASMUS+ workshop week*

Workshop participants: Flóra Barkóczi, Dóra Halasi, Barbora Špičáková, Irena Lehkoživová and Teja Merhar

The five-day workshop provided the opportunity for two employees of the Artpool Art Research Center, Dóra Halasi and Flóra Barkóczi, to study the operation of the Fine Art Archive in Prague, its principles of collection and arrangement, as well as its database, and to present the working methods and collecting techniques of the Artpool archive. The hosting archive in Prague was represented by Barbora Špičáková and Irena Lehkoživová, while the third participant of the workshop was art historian Teja Merhar from the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana. The aim of the five-day programme was not only to learn about the working methods of the two institutions’ archives but also to learn from each other and exchange ideas about archives, as well as to meet and build relationships with the most important institutions and actors in the local art scene, and establish long-term collaboration. In connection to this, it was decided to mount an Artpool archive exhibition in September this year in the Fine Art Archive exhibition space, in the ‘Small Tower’ next to the library and bookshop located on the first floor of the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. The exhibition space in the exciting building of DOX provides the Fine Art Archive with an excellent opportunity to present archival materials with greater visibility and, to facilitate this, the archive’s staff organises 4 to 5 exhibitions at this location each year.

* The European Commission's support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Moon Museum 1969 – Art and Space exhibition

György Galántai: A Hungarian in Space sound object loaned from Artpool’s collection

György Galántai listening to his work titled A Hungarian in Space

EVERY DAY IS A GOOD DAY
Artpool Art Research Center / Museum of Fine Arts alternative presence

This year’s exhibition event of Area 51 was inspired by
John Cage’s sentence: EVERY DAY IS A GOOD DAY.

The interactive exhibition includes documents of the banned avant-garde art of the 1960s and 1970s, György Galántai’s object works and collection of work tools as well as his new, large displays titled Every Day Is a Good Day and presentations by Péter Popper.

The exhibition space of the Galántai House hosted

the show titled WHAT IS GIVEN A NAME EXISTS
presenting 15 years of Artpool’s participation in Kapolcs festivals
in images, videos and documents.

The exhibition is also the summer project of Artpool, 40 years old this year.

Curator: György Galántai
Guest: ISBN book+gallery

Press:

Flóra Barkóczi: Minden nap szép nap. Beszélgetés Galántai Györggyel a kapolcsi 51-es körzetben [Every Day Is a Beautiful Day. Conversation with György Galántai in Area 51 in Kapolcs], artportal.hu, 1 September 2019.

Emese Kürti - Zsuzsa László: „Engem az információ érdekelt mindig”. Évfordulós beszélgetés Galántai Györggyel [“I have always been interested in information”. Anniversary interview with György Galántai], exindex.hu, 19 September 2019.

Gabriella Schuller: A Holonikus út és a Holarchia tér. Galántai Györggyel beszélget Schuller Gabriella [The Holonic Road and Holarchy Square. Gabriella Schuller in conversation with György Galántai], Balkon, 2019/9., pp. 26-31.

The Big Shift: the 1990s. Avant-gardes in Eastern Europe and Their Legacy
(Summer School)

Flóra Barkóczi’s study trip and participation in a workshop focusing on the art of the former socialist countries in the nineties was a continuation of the long-standing good working relationship between Moderna Galerija Ljubljana and Artpool Budapest.

Speakers at the seven-day workshop organised by Boris Groys and Zdenka Badovinac: Inke Arns, Sezgin Boynik, Boris Buden, Branislav Dimitrijević, Keti Chukhrov, Eda Čufer, Charles Esche, Marko Jenko, Viktor Misiano, Marko Peljhan, Bojana Piškur, Walid Raad, Igor Španjol, Anton Vidokle, Martina Vovk, and Arseny Zhilyaev.

The presentation (Artists’ archives – war, self-histories and piracy) held by Zdenka Badovinac, who has held the post of director of the Moderna Galerija and Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova for twenty-six years, focused on the role, position and significance of artists’ archives.

Badovinac cited the Artpool archive, established by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay, as a positive example of the next stage in the development of artists’ archives.

Badovinac primarily linked the role of archives to the process of historicisation: in her view the processes drawing on the concepts of historicization and self-historicization were triggered by the recognition of the lack of historical processing after the change in the political system in the region.

Since in the 1990s Ljubljana was one of the centres of early Internet art (net.art), Flóra Barkóczi searched for and located materials in the archives of MG+MSUM for her research, exploring technology-based art networks and the relationship between art and the Internet. During her time abroad she had the opportunity to meet representatives of technology-based art, such as Vuk Cosic, Marko Peljhan, and the Ljudmila Collective.

Annual meeting of Erasmus+ and European Art Net

Erasmus+: This time the annual working meeting of the Art Archives Exchange – Educational Strategies for Contemporary Art Archives Erasmus+ project, which has been held since 2018 with the participation of Artpool and four other art archives (basis wien, Vienna; MNAC, Bucharest; Fine Art Archive, Prague; MG+ Archiv, Ljubljana), was hosted by the Fine Art Archive in Prague. In addition to becoming familiar with the host archive, the purpose of the annual meeting is to summarise the results and mobility programmes realised so far, and to discuss the various strategies of the work processes in the archives. At the same time, special attention was devoted to discussing what kind of final product could be used to present the results of the two-year programme.

As far as Artpool is concerned, such a product could be the reading circle workshop on the theme of the ‘archive’ the preparations for which were made during the meeting organised at Artpool in February 2019, or the exhibition held at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art during this meeting in Prague with its theme being Artpool’s project of 1984 titled Hungary Can Be Yours!.

Participants of the erasmus+ and EAN meetings

European Art Net:

Given that the coordinator of both the Erasmus+ and the EAN projects is basis wien and there is an overlap between the participating institutions, the annual meetings in 2019, similarly to 2018, took place consecutively and were connected, increasing the opportunity to build professional relationships. The two-day EAN meeting, which followed the Erasmus+ meeting and which Artpool has been invited to for three years, was attended by the representatives of institutions such as ZADIK, Cologne; basis wien, Vienna; Institute for Modern Art, Nuremberg; kunstbulletin / artlog, Zurich; SIK-ISEA Zurich; documenta Archiv, Kassel; Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; MNAC National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Zentrum für Künstlerpublikationen in der Weserburg, Bremen; and Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek, Cologne.

The main purpose of EAN is to coordinate and connect European art archive databases, which Artpool should also eventually join in the longer term. The European art institutions participating in the project maintain a constantly expanding common database.

In the photos: Pavlína Morganová, Lukasz Guzek, Henar Rivière, Manuela Putz

Speakers who were invited to this year’s meeting and presented their collections included: Pavlína Morganová (Academic Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts, VVP AVU, Prague), Lukasz Guzek (Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk), Henar Rivière (Archivio Lafuente, Santander); Manuela Putz (Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen).

At the meetings in Prague Artpool was represented by Flóra Barkóczi and Júlia Klaniczay.

Photos: Artpool, basis wien, Fine Art Archive

Commonpress 51 / Hungary Can Be Yours:
A mail art project in the context of the secret service*

Exhibition linked to the annual meeting of Erasmus+ and European Art Net, held in the DOX in the exhibition space of the Fine Art Archive.

The exhibition was opened by Jiří Hůla, Flóra Barkóczi and Júlia Klaniczay.

The exhibition displayed a digital poster adaptation of Artpool’s last banned exhibition Magyarország a tiéd lehet (1984) as well as contemporary documents, including secret reports on the exhibition, and other Artpool publications and posters.

To our greatest pleasure, Artpool’s exhibition in 1984 - which was the last banned exhibition before the change in the political system - and its history aroused a lot of interest among the museum experts present at the opening.

Curator: Flóra Barkóczi

Photos: Artpool, basis wien, Fine Art Archive

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* The European Commission's support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

LEFT TURN / RIGHT TURN. Artistic and political Radicalism under Late Socialism. The Orfeo and the Inconnu Groups

Curators: Kristóf Nagy and Márton Szarvas

How do artistic and political radicalism come together? The Orfeo and the Inconnu groups expressed their critique of the system of state socialism in different decades and in different ways but their history still shows the conditions and opportunities for radical artistic and political criticism in the Kádár era. The different paths of the Orfeo Group, representing the movements of 1968 worldwide, and the Inconnu Group, which moved from the underground of the 1970s to the political opposition of the 1980s, show the defining ideologies and mechanisms of late socialism... (excerpt from the exhibition brochure).

Kristóf Nagy conducted a large part of his research on the Inconnu Group at the Artpool Art Research Center and Artpool contributed to the exhibition by loaning works from its collection.

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Artists & Agents. Performancekunst und Geheimdienste / Artists & Agents - Performance Art and Secret Services exhibition

Curators: Inke Arns, Kata Krasznahorkai, Sylvia Sasse

Interior photos of the exhibition and works loaned by Artpool featuring the actions of György Galántai and László Algol akcióiról (Kápolnaműterem, Balatonboglár, 1973), “Artists & Agents. Performance Art and Secret Services”, HMKV at Dortmunder U, 26 October 2019–19 April 2020, fotók: Chris Franken

“[…] The international group exhibition Artists & Agents – Performance Art and Secret Services focuses on the interaction between secret services and performance art – an art form that was considered particularly dangerous by the secret services of the socialist countries in Eastern Europe. […]

The intelligence reports document, sometimes down to the smallest detail, artistic activities; they speak of the monitoring and "processing" ("destruction", "liquidation") of the artist scene and reveal information about the active, operative intervention of the state in the artistic production. However, not only the artists used performative techniques; also the agents had to "perform" to gain relevant information about performance art. […]”

Artpool contributed to the exhibition by loaning several documentary photographs and by supporting research on the theme (excerpt from the exhibition brochure).

Artworks and documents in the context of new technologies at Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest

Presentation by Flóra Barkóczi at the Artworks from the Digital Era in Galleries and Museums colloquium

The aim of the discussion was to explore aspects of the making, collecting and presentation of works dependent on technology with the participation of art archives, institutions and individuals involved in the theme. The professional event was attended by representatives of several institutions that are indispensable to the research and preservation of technology-based art, including: Gaby Wijers (LIMA, Amsterdam); Dušan Barok (Monoskop); Jana Horáková (Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno); Michal Klodner (NFA, Prague); and Miklós Peternák (C3, Budapest).

Flóra Barkóczi’s report on the colloquium in the PUNKT article of 02.12.2019:
Fenntartható technológia? Művészet és megőrzés kérdései a digitális korban
[Sustainable technology? Questions of Art and Conservation in the Digital Age]

PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF ARTPOOL

Júlia Klaniczay’s presentation organised by the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universität Bremen as part of the 1989 – end of an old, beginning of a new world? series of events about the past, present and future of Artpool

Moderator: Susanne Schattenberg (Director, Forschungsstelle Osteuropa)

Downloadable flyer of the event (pdf)

Reciprocal Decipherments –
Circulating Works, Words, Ideas, and Agents as Constituents of the Discourse on East European Art

Zsuzsa László’s presentation at the international conference titled Exhibitions as Sites of Artistic Contact during the Cold War

Ieva Astahovska, Katalin Cseh-Varga and Zsuzsa László at the discussion of Session 1

The conference was organised by Cristian Nae (UNAGE Iasi) and Katalin Cseh-Varga (Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Wien) within the framework of the Romanian “George Enescu” National University of Arts’ research programme titled Crossing the Borders: Transnational Collaborations and Institutional Critique in Exhibitions of Eastern European Art during Late Socialism (1964–1989) The purpose of the conference was to provide an overview of the exhibition history research work carried out on various Eastern, Central and Southeastern European art scenes and through this explore the role exhibitions played in building international relations during the Cold War. The organisers see exhibitions as a field for cultural relations, cultural diplomacy, institutional critique, exchanges of ideas and innovative curatorial and artistic practices on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The history of exhibitions throws light on the formal and informal networks of relationships that contributed to the mobility of works, artists and ideas and the international cooperation of various institutions.

More about the participants and the presentations here

Impossible Realism –
the Clash of Artistic Utopias with Reality before and after the Change in the Political System

The panel organised by the Artpool Art Research Center in the context of the interdisciplinary contemporary history and political science conference of 1989 and the Change in the Political System: Possibilities of Social Action jointly organized by several Hungarian research institutes.

Evoking György Galántai’s Impossible Realism project (2001), Emese Kürti and Zsuzsa László approached several colleagues studying the connections between art and social sciences and asked them the following questions on behalf of Artpool:

What (impossible) utopian ideas were formulated in the fine arts and its border areas before the change in the political system?
What was the source of optimism during the period of the change in the political system?
What attempts were made to realise utopian ideas around the change in the political system?
Why did these utopian models prove to be impossible, again, in the new contexts created after the change in the political system?
Are there any examples of achieving the ‘impossible’?

Many interesting ideas for presentations were submitted to the call, from which Artpool’s double section, consisting of a total of seven lectures, were put together for the large-scale conference held in Szeged in November 2019. The lectures held in the Artpool section and in other sections of the conference as well as the discussions that followed raised unspoken questions, which were so important that we felt it necessary to document the discussions in a publication, Enigma’s special issue title Impossible Realism, containing the presentations in the Artpool panel as well as Júliusz Huth’s presentation held in the section Change in Art – 1989 and the Effect of the Change in the Political System in the System of Contemporary Fine Art Institutions.

Programme of Artpool’s sections I and II

Impossible Realism –
The Clash of Artistic Utopias with Reality before and after the Change in the Political System

Organisers and moderators: Júlia Klaniczay, Emese Kürti, Zsuzsa László

• József Mélyi: Change in the Political System, 1983
• Péter György: The Naïve and Utopistic Neo-avant-garde and the complacent Profession (The Situation before 1989)
• Emese Kürti: The Institution as Utopia. Hungarian Art Institutions and Media Preparing the Way for the Change in the System
• Zsuzsa László: The Flow of Concepts – Contextual Attempts at Integrating and Historicising Conceptionalism and Realism
• Eszter Lázár – Katalin Székely: Rebels – Art Academies and the Change in the Political System in Eastern and Central Europe
• Katalin Timár: Then and Now. About the Utopias of the System of Fine Art Institutions
• Flóra Barkóczi: The Utopia of the World wide Web – The Relationship between the Internet and the Fine Arts Following the Change in the Political System

Gabriella Schuller held a presentation about Péter Halász’ system-changing performances in the section titled The Stage and the Auditorium – Coding and Decoding in the Theatre during the Kádár Era.

Facebook page of the event

Precise like an Atomic Clock exhibition

Numerous archival documents – invitations and photographs – and a great many posters loaned by Artpool for the part of the exhibition on archives and for the catalogue.

Curator: Kata Balázs
Opening performance: New Modern Acrobatics (István efZámbó, János Szirtes, László feLugossy and Tibor Szemző)
(photos and video: Dóra Halasi)

Euphoria? Stories of a System Change from Hungary
(cooperation)

In cooperation with Flóra Barkóczi, presented in the exhibition’s section on archives were the historic exhibition of 1984 titled “Magyarország a tiéd lehet!”, famously known as the “last banned exhibition”, and its re-construction in 1989, as well as the footage of the debate between the banners and the banned, which took place at that time, together with the secret service reports made public in 2000.

More can be read about the professional operation of the Artpool Art Research Center in 2019, as well as about topics researched there, the publications and the growth of the archive during the year in our annual report (in Hungarian).