Nada Prlja, Peace Wall, Berlin Biennial, 2012

Symbolising the new social divisions at the heart of a reunited Germany.

Société Réaliste, The Fountainhead, 2010



"How do buildings, public sculptures and monuments express and perpetuate ideology? How do public spaces visualise the relation between the modern state and culture? Such questions are raised by Société Réaliste in its critical analysis of the connections between architecture and history, buildings and political power."

Major solo show at Budapest's Ludwig Museum April 2012

Maurizio Cattelan, retrospective, Guggenheim New York, 2011

Fourth Republic, Peking Square, public intervention 6 September 2011

The sign at the entrance to Budapest's former Moscow Square metro station (recently renamed after a dull 19th century Hungarian politician) was changed to Peking Square by activist group Fourth Republic one morning, with portraits of Budapest's rightwing Mayor and Prime Minister hung either side, drawing attention to the government plans to strengthen ties with China and cut loose from the influence of Western banks and multi-nationals.

Janos Fodor, Escape Attempt II,DVD 22",(2011)



Set to a rousing remix soundtrack of the pink panther, we see the artist circumnavigating Budapest's Kunsthalle. It's not as dangerous a position as it seems, and escape appears to be neither about breaking out nor breaking in to the institution, but continually circling.

Joanna Rajkowska,Airways(2008)



Having the opportunity to show this remarkable work in an exhibition in Croatia reminded us how fresh and relevant it remains to current concerns around nationalism and cosmpolitanism in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Szabolcs KissPál, Parallel Gazes, 2011

"Public monuments are forms and tools of ritual representations which enhance, control and contribute to the construction of collective memory and identity. Parallel Gazes is a photographic project investigating public monuments dedicated to historical personalities. Erected both in London and Budapest, these figures outline an alternative map of shared cultural values of two distant locations, and highlight connections of their collective memories. The photographs, taken from the viewpoint of the statues themselves, focus on the urban landscape and surrounding environment that these figures have been continuously “looking at” since their erection, making explicit also the differences between the two societies and their contemporary realities."
http://www.artnetworkagency.org.uk/parallel%20gazes_guide.pdf

Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, Face to Facebook, 2011

Stealing 1 million Facebook profiles, filtering them with face‐recognition software and then posting them on a custom‐made dating website, sorted by their facial expression characteristics.
http://www.lovely-faces.com

In an attempt to free personal data as Facebook’s exclusive property we spent a few months downloading public information from one million profiles (including pictures). Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions.

After a few weeks we had to face the evidence. All that people wanted was to attract new people, have more relationships, to express and receive love through their digital traits. But they were trapped by Facebook owning their data and restricting their actions with primitive privacy rules. They wanted more than just their restricted circles of "friends" and they wanted it quickly and easily.

Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook’s constraints and boring social rules.

So we established a new website (lovely‐faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data. Now they are there, in full effect, free to keep in touch with a whole world of men and women and anything in between. And we accomplished our mission: the final piece of the free relationships interface is now running.

Oliver Ressler, Too Big to Fail (2011)

'“Too big to fail” is how politicians assess major banks during economic crises and why they claim that banks should be bailed out through public money. Banks are regarded as essential to the system; their poor performance can endanger the entire capitalist system.
In the piece “Too Big to Fail”, the four words “too big to fail” are installed on a 16.85-meter-long wall in Kunstraum Niederösterreich. The text’s letters consist of a photo showing people at a demonstration organized on March 28, 2009 in numerous cities around the world. The protestors marched under the common slogan: “We will not pay for your crisis!” The demonstrations opposed a massive redistribution of public resources from the bottom to the top, as practiced by the nation states in their alleged attempts to manage the crises. While governments assisted banks with billions, they took money away from the majority of working people. In contrast to banks, no rescue plans focus on people with financial problems and in poverty; their misery and discontent do not threaten the system.
“Too Big to Fail” creates an image of the desire that the global movement for a democratic transformation becomes system-relevant, no longer ignored by those in power.'

Csákány István, Bernsteinzimmer (2010)

A 1:1 all-wooden replica of the private workshop of a jack-of-all-trades: the well-known messy sanctuary of (usually) men where complex, creative and down-to-earth manual work.

Winner of AICA Hungary artist prize December 2010

Siniša Labrović challenges the Croatian Minister of Culture to a boxing match to defend his title on a public square in Zagreb, September 2010.

Deimantas Narkevicius, Into the Unknown, film, (2009)

Everyday life in the DDR made real through cleverly reedited archive footage.

The Boat, Croatian entry for the 2010 Venice Architectural Biennial

János Sugár, intervention in the György Lukács Archive, 12 May 2010

Work for free or choose work that you would do for free...

After the intervention, the picture was returned to its place. The artist commented that the next time his work will be visible will probably be when the removal men come to pack up after the threatened closure of the Lukacs archive is finally carried out.

Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini, Communa under Construction, film (2010)

Henrik Martin, Space Buddha, 2010

Michael Rakowitz, The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one's own, 2009

Recreation of Saddam Hussein's Swords of Victory arch using plastic toy soldiers, wood, and pages strip from Sadam's own books.

Jason Coburn, From Disco to Disco (2009)

Rudolf Pacsika,Money Making Systems No.3 (1996)

Janek Simon, Home Made Digital Watch, 2005

Heath Bunting, Synthetic Matural Person For Sale, 2009




dear natural person

this autumn i will be building a new synthetic natural person

previous version can be found at: http://status.irational.org/identity_for_sale/

this identity will be developed to united kingdom (UK) corporate grade security (bank account, mobile phone contract, ...)

if you are interested in having it tailored to suit your needs, then please contact me face to face - please do not email or call me

the price will be in the range of 2000 - 5000 gbp

hope all is well

heath

Bob and Roberta Smith
Off Voice Fly Tip (2009)
'Each week during the Triennial Bob and Roberta Smith make a new work in response both to the exhibition and weekly conversations between the artist and the curator...

As fast as the works appear, the work from the previous week will be placed on a pile of discarded art works in the Duveen galleries...

By the end of the show there will be three months worth of intervenions which will be a physical conversation.'

Joanna Rajkowska
Airways (2008)
Hungarian nationalists on a sightseeing tour in an aging plane with representatives of ethnic minorities and foreigners living in an experiment to show the Hungarian society, which is fragmented along increasingly diverging fault lines.

Guido van der Werve
Nummer Acht. Everything is Going to be Alright (2006)

in Guido van der Werve’s film Nummer Acht. Everything is Going to be Alright the fragility of hope is suggested through the magnetic image of the artist walking a few steps ahead of an icebreaker on the frozen sea off Finland.

Miklos Erhardt
FOOTNOTE TO BARE LIFE - 26 CARDBOARD BOXES THAT (ARGUABLY) CONTAIN ALL MY BELONGINGS TO DATE (2008)

Walid Sadek
Mourning in the Presence of the Corpse (2007)

'Let the dead pass on. Let them depart and with them be gentle, "give them a little encouragement and help them build their little ship of death... like departing mariners, lovingly."* These words resonate with the quietude of a model sociality that congregates around the dying like ship-builders do around the hulk of a ship; a sociality busied by preparations for a last voyage and therefore intimately concerned with the mortality of the living as with the lives of those it calls dead. More importantly, these words exude a sort of lucidity impossible to grasp or factually experience in societies that linger amidst the remnants of its own internecine violence; namely in societies that mourn in the presence of the corpse.'

János Sugár
Sztriptiz (2007)

'Writing texts on the wall has a tremendous tradition in the folklore of big cities. It is one of the simplest ways to demonstrate freedom; the creators communicate with every citizen of the city, in principle. They make intrinsically illegible town legible. Just think of the confessions, names preserved on the walls and other signs having lost their significance. The majority of them are occasional inscriptions defended by nothing, neither physically nor morally; to the contrary, people seek to remove them...Through my present work I would like to record one (or more) inscriptions of this kind, that is, to lengthen its natural lifetime by placing it into the medium of art.'

Csaba Nemes
ABC-CBA (2006)

'The most exciting momentum of these processes is the way late capitalism invented the global look-alike of soc-real product to visually distinguish self-produced goods, and that might as well be called cap-real.'

Ivan Ladislav Galeta (2006)

'This is only a trace of artistic fruits which in their original form are no more the basket was woven in Ludina some thirty years ago'

Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija
Stories are Propaganda (RCA London, March 2006)
'It's hard to think about the present because the past always glows.
In the good old days before capuccino and sushi and ruccola went global. Well before red peppers spiced up our salads. Before adventure became a sport and nature a spot...Before cell phone conversations were banned on trains. Before googling became an aspect of human behaviour...In the good old days when people walked on the moon and snow covered London for weeks during Christmas time. No, it's too far away, I don't remember all that. It never happened.' (excerpt)

Random Rountines
Installation, Budapest Kunsthalle (Dec 2005)
The purpose-built installation by the Randomroutines is an allegory for the over-production of images, paintings and art objects. A conveyor belt runs uninterruptedly across the floor into a skip, suggesting the fate of creative ideas in the contemporary art world. Visitors are implicated in this process of art consumerism by being forced to trample over the work to pass through the room. The work is carried out in sustainable materials, such as cardboard and plywood, commenting on over-production in society, while the cardboard cut outs in the skip are suggestive of urban guerrillas, and banner like objects in one corner add to the atmosphere of protest in this environment.

Andras Kiraly, LTP, 2005
Referring to the burden of socialist public art in Hungary with both mockery and nostalgia, this graduation work mimics the effect of the light from television screens at night from the windows of tower blocks.