Giardini di Castello, Venice, 10 June – 21 November




Hungarian Pavilion
The Venice Biennale, 2007
52nd International Art Exhibition
Dr. Zsolt Petrányi – Commissioner
Katalin Timár – Curator

The exhibition and the catalogue of the Hungarian Pavilion are supported by the National Cultural Fund and the Ministry of Education and Culture with the contribution of Mûcsarnok / Kunsthalle, Budapest.

From June to November 2007 the Hungarian Pavilion of the 52nd Venice Biennale showcases Andreas Fogarasi’s project Kultur und Freizeit (Culture and Leisure) curated by Katalin Timár. The project focuses on cultural peripheries and the changing locations of popular culture, a phenomenon affecting and concerning nowadays all Europe.

Andreas Fogarasi (b. 1977, Vienna), who has already successfully participated in many leading international exhibitions and art institutions (Manifesta Frankfurt am Main, Palais de Tokyo Paris, Kunstverein Graz, etc.), shows his singlechannel video series about the present state of cultural centres in Budapest. The videos are presented in separate black boxes designed exclusively for the Hungarian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Entering these sculptural micro-cinemas, the viewers can sit down and watch 6 videofilms about cultural centres in Budapest, 5 to 10 minutes long each.

Rather than being straightforward documentaries these short films focus on the global phenomenon of the changing status of cultural institutions and public spaces on the peripheries of high culture.
Fogarasi’s images, slow-motion, emphatically subjective, loitering on architectural details and urban suroundings, research the situation of these cultural sites which have slowly become the islands of subcultures, alternative satellite cultures recently. Through their history and role these cultural centres were at once locations of the democratization of culture centrally controlled and supervised in Hungary and thus connect to the past political system of the country, though they date back to the 19th century conception of workers’ associations and clubs. In the shadow of the recent proliferation of consumer culture and cultural eventism they have been more and more pressed to the social and cultural periphery.

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