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“Enkel and other Folk - Upheaval in the 70”  (the Enkel is a reference to the group “Karl’s Enkel” - Karl’s Grandsons) is so far the last of the countless exhibitions of the Association Song and Social Movements. Before that only few people addressed the emergence, expressions and general history of cultural opposition in the GDR. But this exhibition explicitly examines this topic. It traces songwriters, song theatres and folk groups that developed in the mid-1970s, “looked for new paths and tried out what you could and couldn’t do”. It portrays, among others, the groups 'Karl’s Enkel', 'Brigade Feuerstein' (with its songwriter Gerhard Gundermann) and the Dresden song theatre group 'Schicht'.

“The night at the movies with a discussions about the films of Nikša Fulgosi and Luchino Visconti” was held in 2017 on St. Catherine's Island (near Pula) on the subject of the Hollywoodization and commercialization of everyday life. As a part of the thematic evening, two significant films were shown - Luchino Visconti's film Belissima (1952), and A Hundred Beauties per Day (1971) by Nikša Fulgosi.

The imperative of beauty (in women) is an interesting phenomenon of post-war European society. Visconti's film Bellissima is one of the most important achievements of Italian neo-realism. The protagonist is a woman from a modest Roman working family who is obsessed with movies, but also with the idea that her little daughter can win in the Most Beautiful Girl in Rome competition and become a movie star. The film shows an unscrupulous struggle for success.

Fulgosi in A Hundred Beauties per Day deals with the Yugoslav ideology, and as in other popular-cultural content, develops a complex attitude toward this phenomenon. The scenes of singing and acting stars who entered the lives of residents through magazines and television shows, helped to create the cult of popular personality in the western style. On the other hand, partly built according to the Italian model, the promotion of modesty was an integral part of the construction of the Yugoslav fashion and the beauty industry. Nevertheless, the contradictions of the Yugoslav system emerge in the beauty contests where socialist morality comes in contrast to the commercial success of the product, in this case feminine beauty.

Video and film / Video exercises / Video installation / Video letter / Video muster / Video interview / Video opera  /  Video about art  /  Video documents  /  Video as video

"What is video, how has it changed in the past half a century? What does it mean that on video sharing websites and collections the motion picture production of the world is being accumulated and multiplied in random or systematic conglomerations, waiting for occasional viewers? What is or what can be video art today?" — These were the initial questions of this exhibition. To provide material clues to lead to potential answers, the curators selected works from the video archive of C³ (Gábor Altorjay, Gábor Bódy, Marcell Esterházy, Richárd Garami, Gusztáv Hámos, Szabolcs Kisspál, Tamás Komoróczky, Dóra Maurer, Hajnal Németh, Anita Sárosi, and János Sugár among others), and presented them in digital format on projectors, screens and terminals.

Art+Text Budapest
January 27–February 17, 2017

The exhibition featured conceptual artworks included in three different projects initiated by art historian László Beke in the 1970s: the works displayed at an exhibition entitled “TÜKÖR/MIRROR/SPIEGEL/MIROIR” at the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio in 1973, a slide show from 1972 entitled “Cobblestones, Gravestones” that was never presented in its entirety and a sample of the Eastern European material that Beke selected for the 3rd Sydney Biennale  in 1979.

Exhibition Wild Graphics. Half a Century of Visual Diversion in Poland 1967-2017 was the first such wide in terms of subject and chronology presentation of art appearing on the streets of Polish cities from the 1960s to the second decade of the twentieth century.

The exhibition, whose musical setting was created by Robert Brylewski (musician of Kryzys, Brygada Kryzys, Army, Max and Waiter, Falarek Band, Witch's World, 52um and many other experimental projects) was an extremely diverse review in terms of formal and range of cases. There were records of happenings, performances and other artistic activities in the public space, carried out in the sixties and seventies by the entire galaxy of Polish neo-avant-garde artists, photos of graffiti, inscriptions on the walls, stickers, posters and installations, as well as original graffiti templates, stickers leaflets and other materials preserved to this day. The topics discussed in the presented works were even more varied, from political issues and current social affairs, through aesthetic and existential issues, to quarrels between fans of various football clubs or the internal rivalry of street writers.

Curators - Tomasz Sikorski, Marcin Rutkiewicz, and Michał Warda - presented in the form of photos, slideshows, films and showcases with original objects, a total of 1,500 examples of unofficial, self-controlled, uncontrolled creative activity on the streets of Polish cities, regardless of the artistic level or political message. Under these circumstances, Wild Graphics as an exhibition and the publication accompanying it is an excellent summary of spontaneous expression and social dialogue on the streets of Polish cities of the last half-century. Tomasz Sikorski interprets this broad approach in his text, proposing the concept of "art on streets" as more containing and less appraisal than street art or graffiti.