Preface

The exhibition Revolutionary Decadence at Museum Kiscell considers the contribution of foreign artists to the art life of Budapest since the rendszerváltás of 1989. One of the starting points for the project is the observation that foreign artists are barely mentioned in local art history and tend to be passed over when it comes to putting together survey or travelling exhibitions of Hungarian art. This is despite the fact that since the changes of 1989, there have been dozens of artists from across Europe and the World who have made their home in Budapest and contributed to the art life of the city, both through their work as artists, as well as by establishing new art institutions and generally making the Hungarian art world a more open and international place.

Curators Maja and Reuben Fowkes decided to delve more deeply into this issue through archival research, interviews with members of the Budapest art scene, and by organising an international conference at the Ludwig Museum on foreign experience in contemporary art in May 2009. Their curatorial research resulted in the exhibition Revolutionary Decadence, which aims to ignite a debate about the presence of foreign artists and their involvement with the city’s art scene. The exhibition is the third in their trilogy of exhibitions dealing with the revolutionary moments of recent history, and follows Revolution is not a Garden Party on the revolutionary legacies of the 1956 Uprising and Revolution I Love You on the resonances of 1968 in contemporary art. The notion of ‘revolutionary decadence’ stresses the role of individuals and informal sociability in bringing about radical social change in the contemporary era, rather than the usual caste of politicians, celebrities and puritanical guerrillas familiar from revolutionary history.

The unique exhibition space of the Kiscelli, which is located in a former monastery in the secluded hills of Obuda, and the fact that the museum also houses the city’s modern art collection, make it an especially resonant place to present the work of foreign artists in the Budapest. The show is made up of mostly new projects in a variety of media by fourteen artists from Scotland to Brazil and Japan to Moldova, all of whom have made Budapest their home at some time in the last twenty years. The show aims to highlight the contribution of foreign artists to the Hungarian scene in the context of a new ‘post-national’ understanding of contemporary art.

ISBN:978-1-905476-46-6
Available from www.cornerhouse.org/books