We were met in the foyer of the Ludwig by its dedicated and youthful director, Barnabás Bencsik, who recently marked his first year in charge of Hungary’s museum of contemporary art. With a casual ‘come on in’, he led the way up towards the three floors of prime gallery space that make up LUMU’s wing of the Palace of Arts on the left bank of the Danube. It seemed we had arrived at an opportune moment, as the next show ‘New Acquisitions and Rarely Seen Works’, was in the process of crystallising in the exhibition space, with many works already installed, while others were still swathed in bubble wrap.

From our sneak preview, we gained the impression that Bencsik is thrilled with the fruits of his first major shopping spree. Years of experience in both the non-profit and private sectors have put him at ease in the mechanisms of the art market, and we got the feeling that he has a good eye for a bargain.

He went for Hungarian mid-career artists, such as Antal Lakner, János Sugár and Szabolcs Kispál, as well as veterans of conceptual art, including Tamás St.Auby, Tibor Hajas and Dora Maurer, in other words, all blue chip Hungarian artists that were sorely missing from the Ludwig Collection. Shopping trips abroad garnered some younger stars, such as David Maljković from Croatia and American artist Sean Snyder, whose video uses documentary footage of a Soviet village art exhibition in the 1960s. Bencsik aptly described this work as a ‘very emblematic condensation of the whole ideological background, of how art was used during the Soviet period.’

Barnabás Bencsik started as a curator at the Studio of Young Artists in 1990, right in the middle of the rendszerváltás or system change. He was engaged in reorganising and reforming the artists association, turning it into an independent artist-run space. One of his best-known innovations was the annual ‘Gallery By Night’ series, with different late night openings on consecutive days. At the end of the decade he moved first to the non-profit Trafó Gallery and then to the MEO, a much-hyped but short-lived attempted fusion between Saatchi and the Tate on the outskirts of Budapest. Several years ago he founded the ACAX – Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange, which focuses on promoting Hungarian artists in the international art scene, a task to which he has been committed throughout his career.

We were wondering how someone so directly involved in the democratisation of the art scene and institutional critique would take to the role of director of a major art museum. We found him placing the new acquisitions in the midst of the in many ways problematic original donation from Peter Ludwig, with which the museum was founded in 1992. While the Ludwig Museum’s Warhols, Lichtensteins, Richters and Yoko Ono have always been prominently displayed, the less well-known or representative pieces have never, until now, seen the light of the exhibition space. Bencsik’s provocative reassessment includes juxtaposing two larger-than-life bronze busts of Peter and Irene Ludwig by Arno Breker, the notorious official sculptor of the Nazis, with a new work by Hungarian duo Little Warsaw, who appropriate communist monuments and symbols. This has opened up the collection for questioning and research, contextualising the new purchases by applying a kind of ‘internal’ institutional critique.

How do you rate the permanent collection of the Ludwig, what are your priorities in developing it further?

The main focus of the Ludwig Museum used to be primarily achieving recognition at the international level through travelling and temporary exhibitions, without really focussing on the collection. That’s why the ‘permanent collection’ is a difficult term. It’s not a huge collection, that’s why we’re focusing on certain pieces, highlighting works that are not so well known. We have a really diverse selection of works in terms of chronology, style and geography. Regarding future development, there are pieces that we very much want to get into the collection, before they’re all sold to collections in places like Vienna.

Recently Irókéz showed their collection in the old premises of the Ludwig Museum in the National Gallery, it seems like many important works of Hungarian contemporary art are actually in a private collection.

Well, it’s important to recognise the different approach to collecting in the case of Irókéz. For me it is obvious that for ten years it was basically a circle of friends, and only later, after they acquired a certain amount of works, did they realise what they had. As for the Ludwig Museum, we have to think quite sensitively about it, as it started as a donation from Peter Ludwig, and only after 1996, when the Museum of Contemporary Art was founded, was it possible to develop the collection and a huge energy went into it. Right now it’s a really established and significant collection, which compares well with others in Central Europe.

Museums are often rational and cold places, it seems like you’re trying to warm up history a little, we have in mind the revisionist exhibition of Amerigo Tót that is coming up, who during his career was first an exile and later a supported artist during the communist period.

Yes of course, it will be warmed up, because it has a kind of emotional relation, but it’s repressed right now in people’s minds. People don’t want to confront their past, it’s completely ignored. Amerigo Tót is an interesting case, as he was promoted by communist politicians, Kádár even visited him in the 1960s in his studio in Rome. I fully expect people over 50 to have a real emotional reaction to that show.
 
Visiting the Ludwig Museum nowadays, the place seems to have a more positive attitude and to be more visitor-friendly.

That was precisely my intention, to involve people in the space. Young art historians and students that we call ‘info-mediators’ initiate discussions with the visitors, creating a situation of conversation and interaction. I had planned to change all the invigilators or guards, but it’s impossible, so at least one or two info-mediators are continuously present in the exhibition space.

You’ve always been very involved with making the Hungarian art scene more international.

When I started in 1990 at the Studio Gallery, I realised that there was no real connection to anywhere, and that, for example, there was no one who spoke foreign languages. So my first instinctual reaction was to try to open things up. I wanted to set up equal, mutual channels of communication, so that’s why I encouraged the artists to get personally involved in the international scene. I suppose in the 90s we built up an appropriate context around the artist run spaces, like the Studio, but I didn’t see a similar kind of interaction on the level of the bigger institutions, that’s how I set up ACAX. My approach is to always try to create situations in which people can meet.  

The curator of the next Documenta was recently spotted on an incognito mission to Budapest, do you expect Hungarian art to be better represented this time?

[laughs] I very much hope so!

And for our last question, many people know your professional biography, but very little about your private interests and hobbies.

Well, I’m not that colourful a person. I’m very busy, I have three kids, and it’s quite difficult to find the right balance, so when I’m together with my family, it doesn’t really matter what we’re doing.