The Revolutionary Decadence exhibition at Óbuda’s Kiscelli Museum highlights the artistic contribution made by foreign residents of Budapest over the last two decades. The range of paintings, video installations and sculpture on show reflects the diversity of the ever-changing community of foreigners who have at some point put their bags down in post-communist Budapest.
The expat’s mix of fascination, altered awareness and wry observation is most successfully captured in the works of Dominic Hislop. The Dumfries artist spoke to The Budapest Times to reflect on the work displayed in the exhibition, and his memories of his time in the Hungarian capital.
“In total I probably spent about two and a half years (in Budapest) between 1996 and 2001. After art school in Edinburgh, I was eager to travel and also curious about the Eastern European countries that were still undergoing changes since the fall of the wall,” he explains. “I spent a month in Prague, a month in Cluj, Romania and then took up a six-month residency in Budapest. I extended my stay because I found being there to be not only fascinating in terms of learning about a quite different social and cultural situation, but my relative anonymity also allowed me a freedom to experiment and work in new ways.”
Eye for the street
Walking around the city Hislop’s ideas slowly crystallised into a concept of making surrupticious alterations to his surroundings. “As a newcomer and imagining I’d only be in the city for six months, I didn’t even begin to attempt to enter that formal scene, but used what existed in the city as the backdrop for a series of public interventions that reacted to social uses of public space and signage, which I’d document with photographs,” he says.
“I made a sign consisting of a generic symbol of a street market vendor, which I placed on the glass metro wall next to the official metro signs (see bottom photos). Under the guise of objective information it suggests an official acknowledgement of the market’s presence and points ambiguously towards the parliament, indicating both the shifting of location and responsibility,” Hislop explains.
“I should also add that though I took the photo very quickly, thinking it would be taken down immediately, the sticker remained in place for nine and half years. I was going to come back for the tenth anniversary, but the station was renovated and it came down.
Expat feast and famine
Asked whether he felt either revolutionary or decadent in these years, Hislop is typically thoughtful: “Well, yes and no. Not really on such a small scale and not really so often. I later found out that there had been an exhibition centred on public art works where the familiar names of the Hungarian art scene made works in the public realm, as a kind of one-off. There were some interesting works in there, but often on a larger scale, and the artists mostly returned to their gallery works after that.
“Coming from a Western country there was at first somewhat of a decadence in the ability to live, eat and drink at such cheap prices compared to the UK, but after a while, once the residency was over, my own savings gone and I had to get work to stay on, though I still had a decent amount of free time, it was a very basic hand-to-mouth existence, which wasn’t particularly decadent. I wasn’t really sure of the value of any of that work at the time, so I don’t think I had the confidence required to feel revolutionary. I think that feeling did come some years later after some mild recognition, sharing of work and ideas with like-minded artists and activists, and consistency in a way of working,” he says.
“It was great to show those works all together as other than their original street representations and online documentation this is the first time that they’ve been shown in Budapest. though some of them are more frivolous than others, I think they work well as a group and show something of a general playful and spontaneous attitude and approach that I had at that time,” Hislop adds.
Haunted by homelessness
The Scot kept returning to Hungary, as well as to the subject of Budapest’s homeless population, a desperate group who leave a lasting impression on so many expats. “During that post-Budapest time I often returned for long visits and developed a collaboration with Hungarian artist, Miklós Erhardt, that began with a homeless photographic project called “saját szemmel / inside out” in 1998. Our next collaboration was in 2002, when we were invited to show at the Turin Biennial. Between then and 2004 we exhibited quite frequently in some quite prestigious galleries.” More information on these projects is available at www.bighope.hu.
“Later I worked with Miklós in creating a photographic exhibition of photographs taken by and comments recorded by homeless people in Budapest. The process of trying to get funding and exhibition space for this project was very frustrating as few art institutions viewed what we were doing as ‘art’, but rather a kind of social work. The project was only taken more seriously later when visiting curators from abroad were looking to gather works which reflected some of the changes since the fall of the wall. We stopped the collaboration in 2004 and since then I have shown new installation and video work in Berlin, Aberdeen and Caracas. I haven’t been to Budapest since 2004, but from what I hear, life in the art world has become more open, diversified and lively. More foreign artists and curators seem to be passing through the city and there is more local interest in works reflective of social and political contexts,” he says.
Not the same brush
Asked whether he feels kinship with the other artists on display at the Kiscelli, Hislop says “I know Katarina Sevic, knew about Eike’s work and had heard a lot about David Wilkinson, who had been around just before I arrived. I like their work, but I didn’t know the other artists. The ones I met at the opening seemed to be nice people, but I didn’t really feel a special affinity with their work. I felt it lacked a kind of edginess that I like in art. A lot had work that didn’t say anything particular about an outsider’s perspective of living in Budapest, which is fine and I know that (the curators) didn’t ask people to do that, but I think I preferred the work in that show that seemed to take the view of being a foreigner as an issue.
“I think it was quite a special place and time to do works in the street – especially in the way that I was doing it, not obviously grafitti defacement or political statement, or advertising a product – as it couldn’t easily be categorised and defined. There was more potential for an idea to swill around in the mind of the passerby as they wondered what it might be. That’s why I mention Kreuzberg [the area of Berlin that Hislop now calls home], which is just saturated with street art,” Hislop says.
“I think there has been some humour in my work, but I would say it’s gentle rather than central to the work. With the Budapest street works there’s a definite serious point that should be considered once any laughter subsides,” he says.
The artists
Catherine Bürki was born in Marseille, France in 1976. Bürki graduated from the Fine Art School of Marseille (DNSEP) in 2004 and has been a member of the Studio of Young Artists since 2007.
Eike was born in Halle an der Saale, Germany in 1966. After graduating Eike moved to Budapest in 1990, co-founding Trafo Gallery in 1998. He now runs Videospace Budapest.
Yusuke Fukui was born in Toyama, Japan in 1971. He studied at Bunka Gakuin Art School, Tokyo in 1990-91, and became one of the first foreigners to complete an MA in painting at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1998.
Sanna Härkönen was born in Finland in 1979 and has several works on show at the Kiscelli.
Rodolf Hervé was born in Paris, France in 1957. In 1990 Hervé left Paris for Hungary, where he became a figure of the Hungarian underground as co-founder of the action group Zero Kilometre. He died in 2000 after a long illness.
Diana Kingsley was born in Philadelphia, USA in 1964 and joined the first wave of foreign artists to arrive in Hungary in 1989.
Claudia Martins Born in Rio de Janeiro has been living in Budapest since 2004. Martins studied communications and also has an MA in Gender Studies.
Nina Möntmann is a curator, writer, and professor at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. From 2003-06 she was curator at the Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art in Helsinki.
Alexander Schikowski was born in Bamberg, Germany in 1973 and studied at Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart and the Academy of Fine Arts Nurenberg. He has been a member of the Studio of Young Artists Budapest since 2006
Keiko Sei moved to Eastern Europe to research the communist bloc media scene in 1988. She has been based in Bangkok, Thailand since 2002.
Katarina Sevic was born in Novi Sad, Serbia in 1979. She is a graduate of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts Intermedia Department.
Allan Siegel, originally from Brooklyn, is a documentary filmmaker, media artist and teacher. He has been a lecturer in Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts since 2001.
Alexander Tinei was born in Caushani, Moldova in 1967 and graduated from the Chisinau Repin State College of Fine Arts in 1991.
