13 Sep 2010

Ernst Museum Budapest presents Related Spaces

Related Spaces, is a reference to the interrelated discursive fields surrounding architectural issues. Bringing together participants from various fields of visual arts, it is an exhibition in and about Ernst Museum in Budapest. Whereas in the museum or gallery an architectural structure is offstage and outside the central focus, here the virtual network of the exhibition provides the framework to open up and exhibit its physical infrastructure, the architecture of the gallery.

The Art Nouveau style building of the Ernst Museum was originally built in 1912 to host the private collection of Lajos Ernst, a small cinema, a few private flats and artists' studios, which manifested a concept of the museum integrated in everyday experience of a bourgeoisie of Ernst's own time. With time, the ownership and legal status of the building changed, and from the 1950s, it became a public institution of contemporary art, with a number of physical, formal and functional changes in its space. As a remarkable building, it is not only an interesting and significant historical artifact, but also an important landmark of the contemporary art scene in Budapest today.

Anthropologists and cultural geographers argue that space is produced culturally, and that architecture is continually reproduced through use and everyday life. Contemporary art and architectural practices of the past two decades have attempted to liberate architecture from rigid classification, and have aimed to redefine it in a wider, interdisciplinary, expanded, field. The Related Spaces exhibition focusses on the relation between space, history, vision and architecture. The site-specific installations of Adrien Tirtiaux, Space Detournement Working Group and Gabriella Csoszó reposition the building as an architectural object and subject of the exhibition. Along with the emphatic presence of architecture, questions of the representation of architectural space arise and are explored in the drawings, photographs and films included in the exhibition. Films and videos by Josef Dabernig, Andreas Fogarasi, Ursula Mayer and Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor explore the role of history and memory in relation to architecture and its experience, the perception of time through space and the architectural object through time.

Related Spaces considers architecture as an exhibition space, as stage, as experience and as an object that embodies collectively shared memories and the imaginary related to itself.


PROGRAM
14 September 2010, 6pm, Opening speech by Andreas Spiegl, curator, founding member of OCU and vice-rector of Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

The main organiser of the project:
Ernst Museum- Műcsarnok/Kunsthalle Budapest

The project is supported by:
Main supporter: Concorde
Supporters: Ministry of National Resources, National Cultural Fund, Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture, Austrian Cultural Forum, Romanian Cultural Institute