Budapest

Studio Gallery FKSE

4th September

Sunday morning in Budapest seems quite vibrant. People everywhere and some shops in business. The suitcase with all the artworks and its necessary underground has been entrusted to the staff of the hostel where I’m staying. Later i will stroll a bit around and visit a museum or two. I was told that all the interesting galleries would be closed today.

 

Studio Gallery FKSE is a place that is self-run by artists and curators under the age of 35. The association has been active for about 50 years and it is quite fascinating how they manage to keep it this way. Every member that exceeds this age gets a senior status which in some way takes away certain privileges. The gallery is just the most public area of the association where member and not just them can show their work. Behind one door there are 3 studios that are lent to the members for a period of 6 months and to artists that come through a residency programme. Behind the other door one finds two or three kind persons who’s job is to help artists and others at arranging around exhibitions or applying to calls and whatever is needed for solution to this kind of problems.

At the moment I arrived, there was already an exhibition therefore it was impossible to install the artworks from the suitcase. The most logical solution seemed to be to present them individually one by one to everybody that would come which is just the contrary what happened in Vienna 2 days before.

Barbara Guttman, an artist that lived in various places between Israel and Budapest offered me to look at the documentation of her work and talk about her and my projects. We spent the evening together discussing about the attitudes of teachers and professors toward art education and some alternative techniques that are mostly very hard or even impossible to be applied in the institutions that function through a rigid hierarchy and still preserve some relations of 19th century.

 

Artists and artworks presented:
Uršula Berlot, Micronature, 2009, epoxy resin on plexiglas, 33 cm diameter
Marko Brecelj, Vatentat (Cotton-Assault), 2004, video of performance, 6′
Vesna Bukovec, It Will Be OK, 2009, video, 3’34”
Gani LLalloshi, 101 Eur, 2010, prints installation
Žiga Okorn, Robert Hawkins, watercollors on paper in a glass vessel, 2008, 40 x 8 cm
Bojan Radovič, Paradox, book of photographs, 2010
Anna Watzinger, 24h transforming of the following works in progress: “studies of time”, “investigation of an apple”, “Ein-Stein”
Tilen Žbona, Messy Message, paper installation, 2010, variable size