This Untamed Field I Know Well - Magnetic Field
10.08.2023 – 18.09.2022Exhibition of MŰTŐ group at Budapest Gallery. This Untamed Field I Know Well: Magnetic Field. Budapest Gallery, Budapest, HU.
Detail from the exhibition - room of Magnetic Field. Variable technique, series of small size clay sculptures, projection. Budapest Gallery,
Budapest, HU. 2022
Photo Credit: courtesy of the artist.
Budapest, HU. 2022
Photo Credit: courtesy of the artist.
Opening performance: hum – Bence Barta(HU) and Esteban de la Torre(MEX)
In the group’s 6-year history,
this exhibition is the first where the eight members not only work together in a collectively created scene – in exhibitions, performances, and music events – but also, literally, create together. This Untamed Field I Know Well is, then, both an experiment and a complex work of art: an attempt at self-definition that explores the boundaries and connections between the individual and the community.
Often, collectives are formed to empower their members – to counteract individualism and alienation. We must, however, not overlook the fact that the past decades have seen a growing need for a sense of community and that the increasing number of collaborative art projects hints at reasons that go beyond individual needs, which must also be seen as a reaction to social issues. With this exhibition, MŰTŐ takes account of our possibilities for thinking about community. It sees the community as a creature, an entity, whose functions can be described through the metaphor of the body. Using the ideas of Italian philosopher and theorist Roberto Esposito and exploring community through the concept of immunity, the exhibition is a system model where excessive self-immunization, a hermetically sealed-off community, is replaced with an open immune system – a community that is expanding. This theory, rather than closing off the community to outside impulses and influences, and risking self-destruction, opens its borders too, or even integrates, these stimuli. The resulting community is, then, an open system that constantly changes, changing, in turn, its environment.
Translation: Benedek Sebastian Purkarthofer
Detail from the process - room of Magnetic Field. Variable technique, series of small size clay sculptures, 3D animation with a series of 3D scanned objects for the video projection.
Budapest Gallery, Budapest, HU. 2022 Photo Credit: courtesy of the artist.
Budapest Gallery, Budapest, HU. 2022 Photo Credit: courtesy of the artist.
MŰTŐ is an artist-run independent platform
and collective founded in 2016 in Budapest. Its mission is to create a physical space for young artists to find new ways of creation. Its community is built through critical curatorial practices and the democratic ideas of DIY culture. Reflecting on the suffocating air of art world institutions, on the difficulties faced by young artists because of it, and on the lack of dialogue, MŰTŐ tried to find an alternative.
MŰTŐ is Lili Agg, Nikolett Balázs, Bence Barta, Zsófia Kókai, Kata M. Kállai, Flóra Pálhegyi, Veronika Romhány, Nóra Teplán.
Detail from the exhibition - room of Magnetic Field. Variable technique, series of small size clay sculptures, projection. Budapest Gallery, Budapest, HU. 2022
Photo credit: courtesy of the artist / Tamás G. Juhász via Budapest Gallery
Photo credit: courtesy of the artist / Tamás G. Juhász via Budapest Gallery
The creation of this art group started with a four-day intensive workshop, then evolved into a flow-like creative-reflective exercise, with the overall result being the individual signatures, quasi DNAs, of the group members. These are bundles of data that the participants have been stitched together, both analogically in space and through a 3D animation.
Process of the workshop. 1) creation of somatic objects 2) digitazion (photogrammetry technology) 3) labeling and clustering in the digital editing space.
Credit: courtesy of the artist. 2022
Credit: courtesy of the artist. 2022
Each of the dozens
of handfuls of biomorphic clay sculptures, placed in the space, is associated in the video with a concept or emotion chosen by each member, placed on a scale of positive and negative emotion and within a set of concepts. This is summarized as a kind of data visualization in the morphing animation, where the scanned counterparts of the objects form subjective spirals, DNA chains, and then flow into each other according to a specific criterion. The adjective morphing refers to this dissolving into one another, and also plays with the notion of plasticity by French philosopher Catherine Malabou. In the case of the installation in this room, the members of MŰTŐ have experimented with how to draw attention to the internal dynamics of the group through the manipulation of a given material (whether it be the mind or the brain, as in Malabou's case). What kind of objects emerge when creative expression is understood as a form of expression? How can this interpersonal emotional, creative context be measured and shown through artistic means?
How can the group's own manifestation, individual internal tensions and relations be taken up in relation to each other?
Exhibition views. Budapest Gallery, Budapest, HU. 2022
Photo Credit: Tamás Juhász via Budapest Gallery
Photo Credit: Tamás Juhász via Budapest Gallery