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.

Josip Vaništa, Oleg Kulik, Blue Noses @Ludwig Museum, Budapest

Transition and Transition.Josip Vaništa, Oleg Kulik, Blue Noses @Ludwig Museum, Budapest
curated by Petar Ćuković
6 February - 9 March 2014

Oleg Kulik: Eclipse 1, cibachrome, 116×84 cm, 1999; 

photocredit: Ludwig Museum (HU)

The exhibition at Ludwig Museum in Budapest Transition and Transition by Josip Vaništa, Oleg Kulik, Blue Noses is curated by Montenegrin art historian and critic Petar Ćuković.It presents works by three artists/artist groups who share a common characteristic feature: their central theme is the reflection on and the process of dramatic social events. Three selected artists explore the time, symbolically marked by the fall of the Berlin wall and what is it that exactly started with post socialism, a time whose very beginning is deeply paradoxically as it is defined by an ending. The present is anxiously lingering between an ending of one era, that it wants to have no connection with, and dreaming about a prolific future that it over and over again fails to reach.

Oleg Kulik: Eclipse 2,cibachrome, 116.5×85 cm, 1999.

photocredit: Ludwig Museum (HU)

Oleg Kulik, a Russian of Ukrainian ethnicity, is a world renowned artist well known for his radical performances and actions. Works from the so called animalistic cycle, where he inhibits an animal persona, became an emblem of his art in the 1990s .This radical actionism, as well as his works in the medium of photography and video, are a reaction to a brutal reality of a post socialist society, of this highly paradoxical time in history.

Josip Vaništa: Together Towards Development, collage, 1995

photocredit: Ludwig Museum (HU)

Josip Vaništa, a Croatian doyen of the Avant-Garde, is in his stylistic expression quite different form Kulik, he is contemplative and reserved, calm and cold, but shares with the Russian the common denominator or analyzing the process of societies passing from a communist to a liberal capitalist system. This exhibition will present his collages, which are stylistically keen to reduction, scarcity and minimalism, and that in a diary kind of way follow the horrors of the everyday transitional society.

Blue Noses: Kids from our block (2),

 chromogenic print, 60×80 cm, 2004

photocredit: Ludwig Museum (HU)

The Russian group Blue Noses (Alexander Shaburov and Vyeceslav Mizin) is according to some one of the most remarkable phenomena in the art world of the 21st century. Their work is based on the tradition of the Russian absurd, but at the same time is highly saturated with humor, self-irony and cynicism. Through the medium of photography and video installations they deal with the everyday cliches in a populist, small and unpretentious way. Their artistic way of expression desires to be understandable to all.

Their most characteristic artistic genres are jokes, gags, sketches and improvisations, recorded by a camera, and presenting the ever frail “little man” as main figure.

"The works by Josip Vaništa and Oleg Kulik, although they belong to different cultural and artistic, and even, to some extent, political contexts, have a common denominator - the reference to the time of transition, that is, the time of a cruel, uncontrolled privatisation. Josip Vaništa systematically produced during the transitional 1990s, in the form, one could say, of an artist’s diary. “Transition” in which an enchanted web which cannot be untangled was woven from bloody war, mindless politics, soulless and profiteering tycoon economics, raging nationalism, a pathetically aggressive Church, a feeble-minded entertainment industry and servile media, producing together vast, nearly immeasurable human misery. The invisible is an active constituent and part of his work, as is an inclination towards reduction. His basic, actually, his only material are clippings from newspapers or periodicals which are then glued to white A4-size paper. Vaništa’s later collages represent the “face of the very horror we are passing through”.said the curator of the project Petar Ćuković and continued "This socio-political and historical context also represented the temporal frame in which Oleg Kulik, an immigrant from Kiev, appeared on the Russian arts scene, more precisely, its Muscovite circles. It was this brutal “unmediated reality” that provoked radical actionism, the most meaningful artistic phenomenon on the Muscovite arts scene this decade, “an art of intense, almost exhibitionist performances in which corporality, physical danger and ethics were actualised”. Kulik’s work includes and animalist cycle, i.e. a zoophrenic programme among which Mad Dog has became an emblem of his art in the 1990s. Although he would occasionally return to the notion of transparency during the 1990s, the radically altered the character of the socio-cultural reality in Russia during the last decade of the 20th century – mostly its brutality – shifted the artist’s interest from somewhat abstract intellectual reflections on reality in general, based on analyses of mediatised sensory perception."

Blue Noses: Am I looking like a looser (1), 

print on metallic paper, 105×150 cm, 2001

photocredit: Ludwig Museum (HU)

"It was in this world, at the very end of the decade, and no less than at the dawn of the “new Millennium”, that the Blue Noses artistic group appeared", explained the curator .
" The appearance of this group, whose members are Alexander Shaburov and Viacheslav Mizin, marked a certain change of generations in modern Russian art. The group deals with everyday clichés to the point of self-irony. Their main way of expression is video or photo recording on a simple disk. They have a tendency towards “populist”, “small” and unpretentious, understandable forms of artistic expression, etc. Blue Noses would fill their works to overflowing with precisely such “lifelike” content, or, rather, the key content used to shape the living space via the principal media channels. As they claim themselves, the art of the Blue Noses is “popular”, understandable in both form and content to all. The face of the current century, as the Blue Noses well know, now requires new artistic phantasms and images."


The exhibition runs until 9th March 2014. The event is organised in cooperation with Croatian art collector Marinko Sudac.

Blue Noses: Advanced apes (1), colour photo

photocredit:Ludwig Museum (HU)

Program details:
6 February 2014, Thursday, 7 p.m. - OPENING CEREMONY
7 February 2014, Friday, 3-5 p.m.
TRANSITION: UNDER CONSTRUCTION - EXPERTS' CONFERENCE(Mini conference in Hungarian)
8 February 2014, Saturday, 4 p.m.
EXCLUSIVE GUIDED TOUR given by the curator, Petar Ćuković, and the artists, Oleg Kulik and Blue Noses(in Russian and Serbian, with Hungarian interpretation)

practical information:
Glass Hall
Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art
Palace of Arts
Komor Marcell u. 1,
Budapest, H-1095
Hungary
http://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/