participants
2025

Art historian Áron Fenyvesi was born in 1983 in Novi Sad. He started his studies at the Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University in 2002, where he studied art history and aesthetics. Between 2008-2009 she was the secretary of the Young Artists Studio Association. Between 2009 and 2010, she was awarded the Ernő Kállai Art Historian and Art Critic Fellowship, which was dedicated to research on the relationship between modernist utopias and young Hungarian contemporary art. In 2009 he was nominated for the Lorenzo Bonaldi Prize. From 2009 to 2017 he served as a jury member of the Esterházy Art Prize. He has published several articles in Hungarian art magazines and ArtReview. He lives and works in Budapest.

István Bencsik (Marcali, May 29, 1931 – Pécsvárad, August 13, 2016) Hungarian sculptor, recipient of the Kossuth Prize- “I am intrigued, absorbed, and made curious by the human body. The body—like an apple or a June bug—is part of the universe. It exists in relation to everything else. The human body cannot be a closed system, since it comes into being and ceases to exist. That is philosophy. A philosophy of the body.It is with the mind and soul that we examine the body. I want to make it visible that it is the human being who observes. Observes? Yes—I want to document being."

Marianne Csáky is born in Budapest and lives in Brussels. She holds a DLA degree from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Her work focuses on personal and community identity, personal experiences of history, and the themes of body and sexuality. She works with a wide range of materials and genres, from sculpture to drawing, photography, embroidery and video. She has lived and worked in many places in Asia, Europe and America, teaching, lecturing and exhibiting. In 2018, she established the independent exhibition space Streetview Anderlecht in her studio in Brussels.

She studied at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts from 1970 to 1977. She belongs to the second generation of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde movement. She was a member of the Rózsa Circle, which played a significant role in the art scene of the 1970s. Her work focuses on the representation of women. Her artistic practice unfolds through drawings, prints, photographs, paintings, sculptures, performances, and installations, which also include her poems, letters, artistic manifestos, theoretical writings on art, and even her studios. She is a recipient of the Mihály Munkácsy Award and a member of SZIMA (Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts). Her works can be found in the Ludwig Collections in Vienna and Budapest, the Museum of Fine Arts, and prominent American and European collections.

Anna Hulačová (b. 1984, Sušice, Czech Republic) is a prominent Czech sculptor known for merging elements of folklore, mythology, and science fiction with urgent ecological and social concerns. Her practice explores the relationship between nature and civilization through hybridized human and non-human forms—often bees, plants, and other organic motifs—highlighting themes of care, decay, and transformation. Hulačová was a finalist for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award and has exhibited extensively across Europe and beyond, including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthalle Bratislava, and Frieze in London. She lives and works in Klučov, Czech Republic.

Tímea Piróth (1991) is a visual artist living and working in Budapest.She graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2015. Her work is based on the visual analysis of the abject. Abject in critical theory refers to a rejection of and detachment from norms and rules, especially at the level of society and morality. The presentation of the doubt and visceral feeling caused by the encounter with disgust or abnormality is the main inspiration of his work.

Zsuzsi Ujj is a visual artist, performer and musician who in the 1980s reinterpreted the expressive possibilities of photography to create a unique series of photographic performances based on gender identity, self-identity and personal experience. Working outside institutional art structures, her black and white, staged works using her own body as a medium combined visuality with poetry, music and cinematic thinking - all in the interdisciplinary spirit of the new wave era.

Sándor Vály (1968) Finnish audiovisual artist of Hungarian origin, living in Umbria. His art is characterised by a conceptual and philosophical dimension, with which he moves in the field of contemporary art. His work ranges from music to film, performance to literature. The tide is holistic holistic works of art that form comprehensive entities.

In recent years, she has been researching how the boundaries of the social body and biological body within biopolitical discourse have changed over the course of the 20th century and what meaning they have today. She has been dealing with fertility and reproductive rights for several years. Her attention is directed toward situations where there is some kind of hindrance in this regard, where fertility turns into ‘barrenness,’ where the event of birthing and birth cannot take place. The focus of her interest is on how the women she meets deal with these (crisis) situations and create new, supportive communities determined by empathy and acceptance.

Tamás Don is a curator whose academic and research focus has been the integration opportunities for young, emerging visual artists within Hungary’s contemporary art institutional system. His professional interests include projects reflecting on social and political issues, the history of post-transition contemporary art institutions, and art education. Since February 2018, he has been a curator at MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen, and since 2021, he has held the position of chief curator. In addition to his institutional work, he has been involved in several independent curatorial projects, including the Bánkitó Visual Arts Festival and the Küszöb Festival. He is also a lecturer in the MA programme in Design and Art Management at Budapest Metropolitan University (METU).

Júlia Fabényi is an art historian and curator, currently serving as Director of the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest since 2013. She previously led the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs and the Vasarely Museum. Her curatorial work focuses on integrating contemporary art into international discourse and promoting the visibility of Central European artists. In 2015, she served as the national commissioner of the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her contributions to the field have earned her both national and international recognition.

Kevser Güler is a curator and researcher currently serving as the Director of the Istanbul Biennial since 2024. Between 2015 and 2017, she was a founding team member and Associate Curator of the Cappadox Festival’s Contemporary Art Programme. Her curatorial work is based on a critical exploration of the current conditions, potentials, and constraints of contemporary culture and artistic production. Güler’s projects span a diverse range of contexts and formats, including museums, art centres, galleries, urban and rural public spaces, as well as non-art venues. Her practice also extends to the development of publications.

Hans Knoll (b. 1956, Alkoven, Upper Austria) is a gallerist and cultural producer based in Vienna. After commercial training and early professional experience in Linz, he opened his first gallery in Vienna in the mid-1980s, followed by a second space in Budapest in 1989—established just prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Knoll has since played a pivotal role in fostering artistic exchange across Central and Eastern Europe, curating and producing influential exhibitions in cities including Budapest, Bratislava, Warsaw, Moscow, and Tallinn. From 2016 to 2020, he served as chairman of the Association of Austrian Modern Art Galleries.

Canadian-born Marilou Laneuville is the Head of Exhibitions and Publications, as well as a curator, at the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, where she has been working since 2008. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including Echoes of the Past, Promises of the Future (2025), which explores new technologies; AYA TAKANO – New Myth (2023); Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg – The Skin Is a Thin Container (2023); and Christine Rebet – Escapology (2021). She is also involved in the creation of artist and curator residencies at macLYON and has published several essays in exhibition catalogues. Since 2019, she has been the co-artistic director of Jeune création internationale, an exhibition devoted to emerging artists and presented as part of the Lyon Biennale.

Dr. Andrea Bordács, aesthete, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Visual Arts, ELTE BDPK Graduated in Hungarian - History - Aesthetics - Cultural Management. The main focus of her research is partly on the border between art and art theory. Besides teaching, he writes and edits art criticism, studies, books and has worked as an independent curator. In contemporary art, she is most interested in body image, feminist perspectives, women's roles, reflection on tradition, i.e. rewriting and reinterpreting it, the digital world, and art education and art education. Another important research focus is the question of centre-periphery and Central European art.

Katica Kocsis, aesthete, is an active participant in the contemporary art scene in Hungary. Working as a journalist and curator, her previous projects have typically focused on women's issues, but she has also organised exhibitions on vulnerability and wandering in search of a home. In a series of video interviews on Instagram, she interviews artists in their studios, which simultaneously give insight into these spaces that are not always visible, while their direct tone aims to connect with contemporary artists. Her first book on Peter Weiler was published in April and she is currently working on a volume on the Duck Collection. He is the founder of the online magazine Focus On Black Art, a platform for interviews with black artists that provide a deeper understanding of black art.

Gergely Nagy (1969), journalist, editor, writer. Lives and works in Budapest. Currently he works for Qubit.hu. He holds a doctoral scholarship from the ELTE BTK. His main fields of interest are contemporary art, cultural politics and cultural resistance. After many years of journalistic work, she has been editor-in-chief of Artportal and then of the online art magazine A mű since 2013. He is one of the initiators of East Art Mags, a collaborative project bringing together five art magazines from the Central and Eastern European region. He is one of the founders of OFF-Biennale Budapest, an NGO that manages the largest civil contemporary art initiative in the region. Author of four books. He has contributed to several reports on the situation of artistic freedom and freedom of expression in Hungary. He is a member of the Critical Culture Group, which organises events and conferences on the state of progressive culture in Hungary.

Attila Sirbik is a journalist, writer, cultural organiser, entrepreneur, born in Yugoslavia, former soldier in Požarevac. He currently lives and works in Budapest. He has published his art articles in Serbian and Hungarian newspapers. From 2000 to 2024 he was editor-in-chief of Új Művészet Online. He also works in web and brand building. He is the director of Symposion Publishing House. Author and co-author of several books. His first novel, St. Euphemia, was published jointly by Magvető and Forum.

In 1989 he graduated from the ELTE in History of Art in Hungary. He worked at the Qualitas Gallery and organized an exhibition of the painters of the Roman School. Between 1991-93 he participated in the production of art TV programmes and made a short film about János Vaszary. In 1995 he founded the art consultancy Vendemiaire. His writings have appeared in several art magazines and in 2003 he founded Artmagazine, of which he has been editor-in-chief since 2005. Éva Rónai has written a book about textile artist Éva Rónai. Since 2007, she has been an art advisor at Müpa Budapest, conducting exhibitions and promoting contemporary art in radio programmes and podcasts. In the Life in Pictures podcast series, she discusses exhibitions with Nóra Winkler. She was awarded the Pro Cultura Urbis Prize in 2024.