Budapest, 8 February–30 March 2008




Selection from the video collection of the Ludwig Museum Budapest

The last in the series of exhibitions featuring the Ludwig Museum’s collection, All That Cinema presents the best of the motion picture works held in the Museum. The selection spans some twenty years, from the beginnings of video art in Hungary up to the present. The Ludwig Museum started collecting only recently, but has over the last few years gathered together a substantial number of video works, spanning the great variety of this art form, from VHS to synchronised, multi-channel, high-resolution screenings and digital animations.
The first appearance of the form in Hungary is represented by the works of Gábor Bódy and Tibor Hajas. Then there are works of East European installation art of the 1980s, by Zbigniew Libera, Péter Rónai and András Koncz. The distinctive 1990s themes of the body and social gender show up in installations by Katarzyna Kozyra, Katja Pratschke, Gusztáv Hámos and the Dutch twins L.A. Raeven. Works by Tamás Komoróczky and Hajnal Németh, also from the 1990s, draw our attention to the relation between the motion picture and pop culture, and their Loud & Clear projects to the creative use of images by the advertising industry. The British duo John Wood and Paul Harrison work with visual humour and creativity. The central issue of the films by Péter Forgács, János Szirtes and L. László Révész are the constructed past and personalised, appropriated cultural history, whilst in the cinema of João Penalva, the hardly-changing image forms into a story through text. The series comes to an end with works produced in the new millennium, focusing on social tensions and violence (János Sugár, Csaba Nemes and Laurie Anderson).
The exhibition’s guest is one of today’s most talented young directors, Benedek Fliegauf. The Museum is premiering his eight-channel video installation Milky Way, a work of psychedelic impact open to appreciation in different planes, a kind of metaphysical experience, following organically from the hypnotic-transcendent world of Fliegauf’s previous films Rengeteg (The Forest) and Dealer.
“The universe consists of 100-800 billion galaxies and has a diameter of about 14.5 billion light years*. One galaxy is called the Milky Way. This is our little home, with only 200-400 billion stars. One of these stars is called the Sun. Orbiting it is a planet called Earth. 6.5 billion people live here. I am one of them. I did not come into this world, I came from it. I made nine pictures around the town where I am living – at the moment. Amazing place, I must say. (* 1 light year = 9.4605 billion kilometres)” Benedek Fliegauf

Exhibition works:
Laurie Anderson – From The Air, 2007
Gábor Bódy – Beszélgetés Kelet és Nyugat között (Conversation between East and West), 1978
Péter Rónai – Neodiogenetika, 1985–95
Zbigniew Libera – Mystical perseverance, 1984–90
András Koncz – Kereszt a Keleti-tengernél (Cross at the Baltic Sea), 1989
Péter Forgács – A quiet night in Greenwich Village, 2007
Hajnal Németh – Face to Face, 2000
Tamás Komoróczky – Lullaby, 2004
L. László Révész – Twice Around Eight, 2005
Csaba Nemes – Remake, 2007
János Sugár – Az analfabéta írógépe (The Typewriter of the Illiterate), 2001
Tibor Hajas – Az éjszaka ékszerei (Jewels of the night), 1978
Gusztáv Hámos and Katja Pratschke – Fremdkörper (Transposed Bodies), 2001
Katarzyna Kozyra – Women’s Bathhouse, 1997
João Penalva – The Bell-Ringer, 2005
John Wood & Paul Harrison – The Only Other Point, 2005
Loud & Clear – Too, 2005
08 February–30 March 2008

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Ludwig Museum
Museum of Contemporary Art
Komor Marcell u. 1.
H-1095 Budapest
Hungary
TEL : (36-1) 555 3444
info@ludwigmuseum.hu
www.ludwigmuseum.hu