Ludwig Museum, Budapest : SMALLER WORLDS - DIORAMA IN CONTEMPORARY ART

SMALLER WORLDS - DIORAMA IN CONTEMPORARY ART 

Open: 14. OCTOBER, 2022 – 15. JANUAR, 2023

 

 Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary

 

Bazaar spectacle, a tool for scientific illustration, children’s toy, or therapeutic method? As the love child of art and the entertainment industry, since the beginning of the 20th century the diorama has been a beloved, though nowadays often critically viewed presentational medium of natural science museums. This presentational format that combines painting methods, stage design and optical illusion, aims to present natural scientific or anthropological results and theories to laypersons as an immersive installation, conveying the illusion of reality within the limited space of a box.

However, the origins of the diorama are rooted much more in visual arts than in the natural sciences. Louis Daguerre, the French painter heralded as the pioneer of photography, presented the prototype of diorama in Paris in the 19th century. He placed layers of grandiose painted canvases on top of each other, which he brought to life with projected light effects.

Other than its educative purposes, much like the so-called peep show and the doll house (which gained popularity in the second half of the 19th century), the diorama achieves a visceral effect in the spectator through a deep psychological mechanism. Here, the mischievous thrill of voyeurism meets other-worldly mistery and the absolute control over this fantasy world. With their secrecy and obscurity, peep shows were able to show the unspeakable and undepictable, hence becoming the form of expression for grotesque and horroristic fiction over time. In close kinship with the diorama, miniature doll houses are popular therapeutic tools in child psychology for processing trauma.

The contemporary works displayed at this exhibition make use of the complex mode of action of the diorama, to render our inextricable modern world accessibleand intelligible not only for the spectator but also for the artist. The works presented take on layers of almost mystical connotations. They awake a childlike wonder in us, allowing a glimpse into another dimension, be it science-fictional, scary, or simply an expression of our subconscious.

In terms of their format, the works presented here at Ludwig Museum range from scientific, field-table-like representations (Ádám ALBERT, Kata TRANKER), through eclectic collections (György BP SZABÓ, Zsili Bertalan BABOS), to works evoking doll houses (Eva GONGGRIJP, Eszter SZABÓ). Multiple works evoke a grotesque dreamworld (László KARÁCSONYI, Géza SZÖLLŐSI, Pista HORROR, Janie GEISER). We may come across miniature worlds (Curtis SANTIAGO), as well as monumental immersive installations (Tracey SNELLING). We step out of the limited space defined by the model’s box, to become a part of the world of the diorama (Alexandra CROUWERS, Daniel ERNST).

Using the tools of contemporary art, these diverse artistic attitudes explore the different forms of appearance of the diorama-feeling and its receptive mechanism.

 

EXHIBITED ARTISTS 
ALBERT Ádám | BABOS Zsili Bertalan | BP. SZABÓ György | Alexandra CROUWERS | Mark DION | Nathalie DJURBERG & Hans BERG | Daniel ERNST | Janie GEISER | GOMBOS Andrea | Eva GONGGRIJP | GWIZDALA Dáriusz | ICKO Dávid | KARÁCSONYI László | Tomasz KULKA | OVÉ PICTURES (Veronika OBERTOVÁ & Michaela ČOPÍKOVÁ) | PISTA HORROR | Curtis Talwst SANTIAGO | Wieland SCHÖNFELDER | Tracey SNELLING | SZABÓ Eszter | SZAUDER Dávid | SZÖLLŐSI Géza | TRANKER Kata | UJHÁZI Péter

CURATORS 
Jan ELANTKOWSKI, PETRÓ Zsuzska

CONCEPT
PETRÓ Zsuzska

 This exhibition of the Liszt Fest is jointly presented by Müpa Budapest and Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art.

 more info here :

 www.ludwigmuseum.hu

 

Budapest, The Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art will reopen on August 20th.

LUDWIG MUSEUM – MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, BUDAPEST IS OPENING WITH THREE NEW EXHIBITIONS


After several months of shutdown due to the COVID-19, the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art will reopen on August 20th.

The first exhibition is a new selection from the museum’s collection entitled Time Machine. The exhibition was created during the short break caused by the pandemic, under extraordinary circumstances, so the organizers could not ignore the lessons of the recent period. This time, works have been selected that reveal different aspects of personal, artistic and historical time to the viewer, and the works themselves can be seen as time machines that allow us to travel mentally.

From September 4, a selection from Art Collection Telekom entitled Keeping The Balance will be on view, which seeks to answer the question how to find and maintain the right balance in a complex, contradictory and often conflict-laden reality. The selection features works by artists with mostly Eastern European roots.

The exhibition BarabásiLab: Hidden Patterns. The Language of Network Thinking will open on 10 October. It presents the last 20 years of research based on the so-called Barabási networks mainly related to the activity of physicist and network researcher Albert-László Barabási. By following the development of network visualization – presenting the main projects of Barabási research lab – the viewer can gain insight into the application of this comprehensive method in art. Using state-of-the-art technology, network diagrams and structures vividly describe the hidden connections and relationships that underlie the studied phenomena.

The Ludwig Museum, including the museum shop, is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 a.m.

The museum does its best to protect the health of the visitors and staff, so we ask you to wear a mask when visiting our exhibitions and keep a distance of one and a half meters in the exhibition spaces.

Will the Internet end soon? @ Ludwig Museum . Budapest

Will the Internet end soon?
exhibition @ Ludwig Museum . Budapest
24. January, 2020 – 26. April
Address:  Ludwig Museum . Budapest
H-1095 Budapest, Komor Marcell utca 1.

CURATORS
Nathalie Bachand, Kónya Béla Tamás

EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Julien BOILY, BORI Bálint, BEÖTHY Balázs, CSONTÓ Lajos, Romain & Simon de DIESBACH, EIKE, FORGÁCS Péter, GERHES Gábor, KOMORÓCZKY Tamás, Frédérique LALIBERTÉ, NAGY Kriszta, NÉMETH Hajnal, PÁL Zsuzsanna Rebeka, Roman ONDAK, Projet EVA (Etienne GRENIER & Simon LAROCHE), Dominique SIROIS & Baron Lanteigne, Société Réaliste, SUGÁR János, SZARKA Péter, SZEGEDY-MASZÁK Zoltán, Julie TREMBLE, Lukas TRUNIGER & Nicola L. HEIN, VÁRNAI Gyula, VÁRNAGY Tibor, ZICS Brigitta


It all began in May 2015, when an article on lemonde.fr spoke of the possibility of a collapse of the World Wide Web. Although this event is largely hypothetical, several articles have been written on the subject in response to a scientific symposium that the Royal Society of London organized around the Internet Capacity Crunch.
In a context where the network could collapse even before the end of its “adultescence”—in 2023, the Web as we know it will barely be more than 25 years old—we can try to picture the fall of the Web and the after-world that would ensue: Empty server carcasses and a sea of electronic junk? A digital oblivion on all screens? A digital desert to drift in? Machines imitating the Web? A handcrafted Internet? Rumours and testimony about what was the Internet? A desperate search for a disappeared connection?
How will the at once dematerialized and delocalized dynamics of power structures be impacted in both their evident economic and inevitably political manifestations if the network is disconnected? But also, what can still be said or done in the meantime? How does one occupy—or not— what is essentially borrowed time and space, a space-time henceforth to be shared between digital and physical realities.
In the wake of these reflections, the artistic proposals that echo these considerations have here been gathered. Though the exhibition was initially composed of Québec artists, Hungarian artists were subsequently added to it for the occasion ‑ from a call for proposals, as well as from the Ludwig Museum Collection, and of early web-based artworks from the C3 Center for Culture & Communication Foundation archives; in addition to artworks by Swiss artists which were part of The Dead Web exhibition at the last edition of the Mapping Festival. This approach thus provides a particular perspective in which to build and unpack our idea of the Web, and, at the same time, its absence.
The Ludwig Museum’s collection is comprised of more than 700 artworks. Through a call for proposals, curators Nathalie Bachand and Béla Tamás Kónya, have selected 5 artworks by Hungarian artists. Several works from the marvelous Museum’s collection and the C3 Center for Culture & Communication Foundation were also added to the exhibition, thus joining the Québec and Swiss selection.
The first iteration of the The Dead Web – The End exhibition was presented in 2017 at Eastern Bloc (Montreal, Quebec, Canada). In 2019, the exhibition produced by Molior was shown at Mirage Festival (Lyon, France) and Mapping Festival (Geneva, Switzerland).
With this premise as a starting point, the works in the exhibition question our relationship to the Internet and, more broadly, the notion of connection as a point of contact with the world. The exhibition is trying to engage the audience in presenting the post-internet world. The cooperative partner of the Ludwig Museum in the utopian endeavour is the Canadian media art organization Molior.

Exhibition coproduced by Ludwig Museum and Molior.

Supported by: EMMI, MÜPA, Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the gouvernement du Québec, ProHelvetia, Conseil des arts de Montréal, Les offices jeunesse internationaux du Québec, Goethe-Institut, Samsung 

The associate partner of Ludwig Museum is C³ – Center for Culture & Communicatio