AKA, Szemző Zsófia: Picture Relations - In Children's Eyes
25 March 2009 – 18 April 2009The approach that the Budapest Spring Festival 2009 offers in the exhibition In Children's Eyes is frequent in the contemporary Hungarian art. Several young people deal with the - seemingly - spontaneous expression of primer artistic manifestation, playful form or structure.
In the spirit of In Children's Eyes, the exhibition of the Inda Gallery connects three young artists working with quite different methods. It is a tradition that we invite an artist from abroad for the spring festival, who presents himself in contact with the Hungarian artists, having the intention of working for the gallery later.
Erik Binder, who lives in Bratislava and has exhibited works in the USA and Austria, lives in the skateboarding, rapper subculture, paints in the style of the graffiti, pours paint onto cardboard, and by doing so, he approaches with peripheral creative manifestations to high art. His psychedelic canvases depict underwater worlds, the colourful visions of the universe, while his latest photos present his astonishing associations of ideas. Eric Binder is well known as a sensitive video artist and creative player who uses any kind of material, presents the relationships and everyday life of those living in subcultures, and creates association installations as well - out of which the Inda Gallery exhibits a few.
AKA (A. Király András) is also interested in public art, street art, although his works are monumental wall-paintings, floor ornaments competing with posters. Two different types of work are exhibited. One of them, a carpet pattern is a public artwork created for the inner courtyard of the building of Inda Gallery, and it will remain there after the exhibition, while the installations are exhibited in the gallery. During his work method, AKA transforms everyday objects by associations and create tableau-like painting-installations, for instance, in this case a kitchen table with surreal events happening on it.
Zsófia Szemző graduated in 2008 from MOME in intermedia. She plans a place-specific work for the exhibition, an interactive board on the wall, created from little pictures of the details of a watercolour series in several pieces that make up personal stories. The young artist records her subjective, surrealist approach in easy, airy pictures. Her narrative works speak of everyday events, things by painting a symbolic object, figure, like a comb, a flower pot, animal shapes, interacting people. This year, Zsófi Szemző participates in an international animation film course in Paris with a scholarship, and she created the exhibited work there.
Simultaneously with the exhibition we organize children's programs under the direction of a museum educator, which is new in the Inda Gallery.
AKA begins painting his carpet in the inner courtyard on the first day of April, and we expect to inaugurate it as the closing event of the exhibition.
AKA (A. Király András) – Living Room – Carpet
April 1 - 18, 2009
The idea:
It is typical that the occupants of houses in town look at cheerless, grey concrete yards from the outside balconies, where once the frame for carpet-beating stood. In 34 Király Street, on the inner courtyard of the house where the Inda Gallery is located, the sight of the bare, bleak geometric concrete pieces made me change the yard into a room with a huge carpet in the most simple way, by painting it.
I made various kinds of plans of the carpet pattern created by the repetition of the schematic depiction of the carpet-beater. Since the appearance of the vacuum-cleaner, people barely use carpet-beaters anymore, for which reason this public art is in fact a memorial of the disappearing object as well.
In my opinion, this work of art is complex - it lifts the space out of being everyday, the mandala-like work changes the inner yard into a relaxation place, and recalls the atmosphere of living rooms. The carpet makes an installation with the house and its occupants, which keeps changing because of the bicycles leant against the wall, waste bins and carpet-beater frames, and while using the place, the occupants change and build it in harmony with their own tastes and ideas. By this means, the public artwork becomes interactive, community-building.
A video work, a performance, an action-document is also made of the work, if the occupants co-operate in this too. These related works record the spontaneous or organized carpet beating on the carpet. AKA
Brigitta Muladiart historian, curator of exhibition
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