Promenade Project Budapest – Place Value in Contemporary Art

It is the declared intention of the Promenade Project, as well as of the Kovács Gábor Art Foundation, which has always considered it very important to support young artists at the outset of their careers, to define this exhibit along the principles of dialogue, exchange, discussion and meeting. Beside highlighting the diversity that characterizes the arts and cultures of the European nations, the exhibit is hoped to reveal those ideas and issues that artists share and that may encourage dialogue.

The overall concept of Lóránd Hegyi, museum director, curator and art historian, focuses on the possibilities of revealing those micro-narratives of the given nations, regions, cities or communities that absorb the different and very diverse identities, and reflect on the increasingly serious global and local problems not with the major, synoptic artistic trends, but through everyday micro-situations, individual thoughts and questions. The idea of the micro-narrative as used for the visual arts was introduced by Jean-Francois Lyotard, who in The Postmodern Condition (1979) proposed that the age of “grand narratives”, which purported to explain the world, offered universal truths and maintained centrally controlled policies for art, had ended, and had been replaced by the locally determined variety of nuanced “small realities”.

When selecting the Hungarian participants of the Promenade Project Budapest, the intention was not (as it could not be) to provide a comprehensive overview or cross section of local contemporary art as a whole, but to outline the different visions that artists under 40 have and offer on the possible directions art might take in Hungary in the first decade of the 21st century. Perhaps the most pressing issue for contemporary art is its own definition of itself; what can be considered lasting, or why is the ephemeral a necessary solution; how can traditionalism be reinvented, or is there any need for a tradition; if there is, how can local artistic strategies, which reflect the Hungarian conditions, be made to be successful in a different climate of reception? The key concept of selection was to find artists who work in painting, sculpture, graphics and the new media, who regularly cross generic boundaries, and whose subjects are closely related to some segment of communal memory.

The Promenade Project Budapest exhibition offers twelve international and eleven Hungarian artists an opportunity to confront their personal micro-narratives, creative thoughts and questions about art. The possibility is there for a dialogue: may the artists live with it.

The artists exhibiting in Budapest are
Attila ADORJÁN | Ruth BARABASH | Erik BINDER | Borbála BLAHÓ | Frauke BOGGASCH | Yves BRESSON | Danica DAKIC | Gábor FÜLÖP | Ugo GILETTA | Veronika JAKATICS-SZABÓ | Marine JOATTON | Tamás KOMLOVSZKY-SZVET | Nina KOVACHEVA | Denisa LEHOCKA | Mihael MILUNOVIC | Zsuzsa MOIZER | Liliana MORO | Ágnes PODMANICZKY | Péter RIZMAYER | Ábel SZABÓ | Borbála SZANYI | Barthelemy TOGUO | Ágnes TÓTH