Annual program 2022

We have found the concept and practice of resilience (flexible adaptation to environmental conditions) expressive as a comprehensive-strategic approach to the exhibition year 2022. The exhibitions feature sub-themes that interpret contemporary life as an extended present. Sustainability combined with a resilient attitude is future-proof. An effective means of formulating and delivering valid cultural messages.

Time Machine: A New Selection from the Collection of the Ludwig Museum
September 1, 2020–January 8, 2023
The time machine is a device that only exists in theory so far, with the help of which we can fly our physical body into the past or the future. The new exhibition at the Ludwig Museum is not about the science-fiction possibility of time travel, but examines the relationship between time and art from different perspectives, and sees the works themselves as time machines that allow us to travel mentally.

{Script:Abstract}: Herr Frey Frei
January 12–March 20, 2022
Krisztián Frey (1929–1997) is one of the outstanding representatives of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and an early Swiss pioneer of international computer art. With this large-scale oeuvre exhibition, the museum is repaying an old debt. As a member of the Iparterv generation, Frey appeared in the progressive art scene in the early 1960s with an abstract expressionist form of expression he developed. His characteristic expressive abstraction combined with handwriting, called “a gesture painting of variable pace,” covered a wide aesthetic horizon, including white-burnt monochrome paintings, diary-like calligraphies of compulsive handwriting, and a world of stains, graffiti, and digital vectors.

Frey’s oeuvre unfolds in its entirety as it has never been seen before from a selection of works from prestigious museums and works lent by Hungarian and international private collectors, from early works unknown to the profession to masterpieces made in Hungary and Switzerland and to pioneering computer art experiments.

Place Value: New Acquisitions
March 3–April 24, 2022
Place Value presents mainly works acquired in the last 7–8 years, which may have the sense of novelty for the audience. The selection also provides an overview of the Ludwig Museum’s collection. It includes works by progressive artists of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde and the conceptual tendencies of the seventies. The special feature of the Ludwig Museum’s collection is its Central-Eastern European character: the newly added Ukrainian as well as Slovak, Estonian, Polish, Russian and Albanian works are displayed in thematic blocks. 

Works on women’s role models, on individual and collective historical memory/traumas, (self-)portraits and their absence are grouped in similar units. More general art-theoretical issues are also addressed, including the loss of “representability” or the difficulty and impossibility of painterly identification, the position of the artist and art in society, the disappearance of the traditions of landscape and genre painting, and the relationship between three dimensions and the plane. A separate room will feature young artists of the painting turn that became increasingly prominent at the end of the 2010s and other talented representatives of the youngest generation of artists.  

Extended Present
April 8–September 4, 2022
The exhibition explores the issue of the permanent transience that we experience today, both on a global and personal level. Partly due to technological progress, partly due to the evolution of social and biological systems, not only has the present become unpredictable and uncertain, but the future looms as an apocalyptic endgame. However, transience also holds the potential for choice and change, which can derive its power from the very ground of this prolonged state and creatively mobilise this power. By capturing the present moment and extending it, the works on display offer possible alternatives in the face of our ever-changing everyday lives.

The international group exhibition will use a variety of techniques and media (installation, multimedia) to capture and convey states of transience.

Emplotment
May 13–August 28, 2022
The international group exhibition entitled Emplotment focuses on the reworking and performative representation of trauma sources using the tools of visual art. The exhibit will examine how the role of the artist has changed in recent decades and what new approaches and perspectives have emerged in the field of trauma processing. Although the analysis of the relationship between art and trauma has a long history, the exhibition emphasises the relational aspect beyond the issue of representation and representability.

“I Am Not a Robot”: On the Borders of the Singularity
September 15–November 27, 2022
As a harbinger of the (supposedly) imminent arrival of the Singularity, the exhibition explores the powerful impact of technological development on our daily lives.

One of the defining global phenomena of our time is digitalisation, which has transformed human life in an evolutionary leap over the past decades, rewriting centuries of fixed habits, forms and behavioural patterns. The digital turn is still ongoing, with our lives moving from offline to online, and the digital presence growing rapidly. Digital technology in its current state is a new normativity that is part of work and life: not an enemy, not a friend, but a natural part of life...

Smaller Worlds: Diorama in Contemporary Art
October 13, 2022–January 15, 2023
The diorama and its cousin, the peep-box, take a variety of forms, both in art and in its border areas: from conveying scientific or social messages to pop art and the grotesque. The common feature of the different dioramas is the crossing over into another dimension. Similar to children’s dollhouses, the diorama is an attempt to interpret the unfathomable outside world by reducing it to a manageable size, rendering it harmless and bounded, and bringing it fully under human control.

After Dreams: I Dare to Defy the Damage
Exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale, Hungarian Pavilion
December 15, 2022–February 26, 2023
This year, the Hungarian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale will feature a solo exhibition by Zsófia Keresztes, entitled After Dreams: I Dare to Defy the Damage, which could perhaps never be more topical than after the pandemic crisis. The exhibition seeks to explore the ambivalent relationship of past and present to the future and the stages of finding identity in four major units. After Venice, the exhibition will be presented in Budapest, as usual.

National Commissioner: Julia Fabényi

Curator: Mónika Zsikla

Press contact:
Gabriella Rothman, rothman.gabriella@ludwigmuseum.hu