It seems hard to believe that this is only the second time that the Műcsarnok has organised a high profile contest to identify Hungary’s best contemporary artist and despite the fact that it’s so new, the AVIVA prize is fast on the way to becoming a national institution. The AVIVA prize is openly modelled on the British Turner prize, which, since it started in 1984, has singlehandedly transformed the obscure and elitist world of contemporary art into a popular hit, with the media frenzy around ‘controversial’ artworks such as Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde and Tracey Emin’s dishevelled bed making household names of conceptual artists over night. The quick and relatively enthusiastic acceptance of the new Hungarian art prize in the local scene is a sign of the desire for a more competitive and high octane spirit, for more champagne and less pogácsa, and ultimately for greater recognition of art celebrities in the media and society.

The organisers of the AVIVA prize set a relatively low age limit of 40 (for the Turner prize it’s 50) to target young and upwardly mobile artists, and offer a tantalisingly large financial reward of 5 million HUF to the winner, which after tax is about half the Turner prize jackpot. The jury is an interesting mix of art historians, critics and private collectors, made up of the Műcsarnok’s very own Főkurátor Lívia Páldi, the dynamic boss of the Ludwig Museum, Barnabás Bencsik, art historian Sándor Hornyik, banker/collector Ferenc Karvalits, painting doyen Attila Szűcs, and Austrian gallerist Hans Knoll. In phase one, each of the jury members nominated their favourite artist - producing a broad sweep of painters, photographers and new media artists – while in phase two, they have the difficult task of reaching a consensus on which of the six will win the trophy.

The hype surrounding the UK Turner Prize has reached a point where bookies regularly take bets on the winner, leading to the surreal phenomenon of punters in betting shops assessing the odds of abstraction versus figuration taking the jury’s fancy. With six horses rather than four, the odds are longer in Hungary, and there’s an even wider choice of artistic practices and reputations to choose between. The nominees include painter Róbert Batykó, who takes us on a surreal journey through a world of useless objects and graffiti, Marcell Esterházy, who has an eye for the humour of clichéd situations and events, and Hajnal Németh, who uses sound and image to overturn our conceptions about identity. Katarina Ševic works with situations that bridge the private and the public and Tehnica Schwiez practice visual sociology, while trendy Parisian duo Société Réaliste, with their clever manipulations of the language of political design, would probably be the bookies’ favourite, were they taking bets.

Following the tradition of the Turner Prize, the winner will not be known until towards the end of show in the first week of November, so as to give the public a chance to make up their own minds about the relative merits of the six nominees. A populist innovation of the AVIVA award is the introduction of a special audience prize of half a million forints, to be awarded based on votes cast by visitors. Even if the spectacle of the race for the prize leaves you cold, the show is probably still worth visiting anyway. Based on the experience of last year, the AVIVA exhibition is likely to be eclectic, diverse and surprising, considering that this kurátormentes extravaganza is also a rare opportunity for Hungary’s most innovative and exciting contemporary artists to do whatever they like in the country’s grandest art space.
(Maja and Reuben Fowkes)