The Mucsarnok plays host this spring to a major exhibition drawn from the art collection from the somewhat paradoxical ‘Museum of the Present’ located in León Spain.  The curatorial angle of Mi Vida aims to show a wide range of contemporary works which respond to the most intense moments of art and life. To avoid dwelling on the dark side of things, the exhibition kicked off with the curators dj-ing on the A38 boat for a partying art world. However the show itself is a good mixture of uplifting, touching and poetic works on the one hand and depictions of war, death and emotional dramas on the other.

Don’t be put off by the first installation, mixing blood giving and food consumption on a rotating platform in the entrance hall, look up instead and ‘Brighten Your Mind’, as the colourful neon suggests – the only work by a Hungarian artist, Emese Benczur. Straight ahead looks promising, as the Swiss artist Pipelotti Rist invites you to lie down on cosy futons and be absorbed by the gyrating nymphs projected on the ceiling above. If you move left or right, there are two films on each side, two meditatively poetic works, and two hard hitting artistic statements about relationships. Candice Breitz’s Mother is a video installation on six screens, with famous Hollywood actresses cut out of context from their original films speaking lines about the problems and complexities of motherhood, and was one of the most talked about works at the 2005 Venice Biennial. On the opposite side, it’s counterbalanced by Jasper Just’s No Man is an Island, featuring a middle aged man dancing in a public square to dreamy music, while a younger man, presumably his son, sits against a wall with tears in his eyes. The work of the Danish artist is one of the most acute reflections on the father-son relationship, and says a lot without words about the social constructs of masculinity.    

The tone set by these works is not completely lived up to by the other parts of the exhibition, although it’s full of famous names. Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Erotic Epic is rated ‘18’ by a sign at the entrance, and is quite a provocative work showing a naked man masturbating in the rain, a field of men copulating with the earth, peasant women massaging their breasts, while in another film they lift up their skirts to show their vaginas to the sky. There is also a monitor in the room, where the artist explains her intentions in revealing the ancient fertility rituals, however, it all seems rather contrived and overly spectacular. 

Similar in this sense is Thomas Hirschhorn’s vast installation UN Minatures (2000), which lets visitors tread a path through the major global conflicts of recent times, from Kosovo to East Timor, intentionally making all the wars look the same, on a terrain of burned out buildings patrolled by white UN vehicles. Although the artist includes informative books and magazines about each of the zones of conflict, it’s still rather hard to apprehend the work as anything more than making a spectacle out of human misery for the gaze of the art audience. The same goes for Luc Delahaye’s photograph from Kabul which aestheticises death and at the same time objectifies it.  

Along with the large scale installations and video works, there is a lot of famous photography, from Wolfgang Tillmans to Zhang Huan, as well as drawings, mosaics and wall painting. Mi Vida tries hard to be more than just a ‘best of’ the MUSAC art collection, and although rather loosely conceived, the show does bring to Budapest a selection of the most appealing works of recent contemporary art.