Inter-Cered International art exhibit in Budapest

How to showcase an art colony on an exhibition? Art workshops on location do not only result in works of art or photographs, but also a series of friendships, meetings, new collaborations and an international melting pot. It’s the time of rest and relaxation, emergence of fresh ideas and their exchange, conversations lasting until the dawn, long days and short nights. Hundreds of artists from various generations and countries have swept through the Art Colony in Cered, Hungary. Now, the exhibition “Inter-Cered” held in Budapest attempts to convey the atmosphere of those events by presenting the pieces of an international group of artists who have visited the town in recent years.

The first workshops were organized in the Art Colony Cered in 1997 by a group of artist friends, who discovered a picturesque town near the border with Slovakia. A few of them decided to buy houses in the area. In the upcoming years, an interest in the location spiked among the artists, and so did the number of houses accommodating them. Currently, there are dozens of such accommodations. A contemporary art gallery is going to be opened here next year. In addition, Art Colony Cered has its own art collection consisting of the pieces gifted by visiting artists to their hosts. The collection is exhibited across Hungary, and presented in catalogues. 

Parallels could be drawn between Art Colony Cered and the very best tradition of avant-garde artist-in-residence programmes in Central and Eastern Europe. Initially your typical painting workshops, they have evolved into residencies, meeting points of untamed artistic expression. Artistic workshops in Osieki organized in the 1960s and 1970s had a similar character. Nowadays, Cered seems similar to Sokołowsko in the Lower Silesian region of Poland. Each year, Sokołowsko holds international festivals attended by closed-knit group of artists from all over the world who gather in this historic place surrounded by beautiful nature to create innovative works of art.

Art Salon Contemporary is the new hotspot on the cultural map of Budapest founded by Tomasz Piars, an artist, curator and cultural organizer. Gallery located on the top floor of the 20^th century tenement house will showcase brand-new phenomena in the arts. Paintings, photographs, sculptures and documentation of workshops at the Art Colony Cered are now displayed in three exhibition spaces of the gallery.

Simultaneously, the exhibition is being held at another fascinating location – the studio of Ágota Krnács, a visual artist and graphic designer associated with Cered. The studio and gallery were located on the top floor of the so called Víztoronyház designed by the architects Tenke Tibor and Endre Mentes in the years 1974-1975. Situated among the large panel tower blocks, this iconic building is one of the flagship examples of brutalism in Budapest. Photographs, installations, films and documentations of the Cered workshops are all displayed in this raw space. During the show’s opening, the audience could even admire the sun setting over the concrete high rises from an adjacent terrace. 

The Art Colony has been collaborating with the Promocyjna Gallery at the Staromiejski Dom Kultury in Warsaw for five years. Each year, gallery proposes the names of several young artists who then visit Hungary. Usually these are debuting graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2021, six artists recommended by the Promocyjna Gallery participated in the workshops: Łukasz, Zbroja, Szaweł Płóciennik, Kaja Wielowiejska, Anna Rutkowska, Bożna Wydrowska and Michalina Kuczyńska. They stayed in Cered for a week to create their work. The majority of them are the winners of the Entry Initiative Award handed out jointly by the gallery and the art academy in Warsaw.

Michalina Kuczyńska, a photographer and documentalist from Katowice as well as an activist in Cered, launched a collaboration with Anna Rutkowska, a painter and performer. Together, they took strolls around the neighborhood, where they started working on their series of photographs “Trouble.” They continued to work together after they came back to Poland (to the Silesian region and the Krakow-Częstochowa Upland). Both artists wanted to escape crowds, to be closer to nature and connect with the Mother Earth. They wanted to seek out fragments of idyllic imaginings in the surrounding landscapes. The photographs were taken in the scorching hot hummer and freezing winter. The situation they’ve created became more and more unreal and surrealist. The photographs portray a naked person in nature, the body stretching out, protruding bones, muscles and veins filled with blood. The body is assuming uncomfortable positions, painfully aligning with the lines of the horizon, tree branches, rocks and arroyos. Also the foliage, moss and greenery become the bio-indicators, the state of which informs us of the imminent environmental catastrophe or climate crisis. On one occasion, the body is splayed on the ground, on the other rising high towards the sky. Its positions are reminiscent of magic rites, as if it wanted to bless or curse the reality. It turns out nature is relentless and far-removed from its own idealized image.

Bożna Wydrowska, a performer and precursor of voguing and ball rooms in Poland (queer dance parties with drag queen races and electronic music), invited other female Polish artists to participate in her performance in Cered. The title of the performance “Voices of Women” alluded to the main theme of this year’s residency, namely “Voices of Cered.” On a stage and in front of an audience, she asked the performers to say the word “pussy” in a different manner. This word is considered vulgar and offensive in a common language. However, the LGBTQ+ community reclaimed this word and altered its meaning to someone extraordinary, outstanding and incredibly sexy. The artist used the word “pussy” in her performance to demonstrate a transgressive potential of language and performative practices. She also intended to shock and leave and impression on a male-dominated audience in Cered. 

Most recent series of paintings by Szaweł Płóciennik was also exhibited in Budapest. Images populated by personas and hetairai are painted on the basis of spontaneous sketches. The artist often uses a spray paint. Those giants barely fit into the compositions, they remind me of monuments or eerie mythologies. They have irregular shapes, large hands and feet, enormous muscles and sad faces. In spite of their ostentatious powerfulness, they seem extremely brittle and ephemeral. Those figures look like they had existed even before the world or only after it collapsed. The exhibit also features performances by the artist’s alter ego carrying the pseudonym White Flower. Here, we could experience more politically engaged activities, such as “Chlebem i solą” (“With Bread and Salt”) referring to the situation of immigrants or “Balloon Operation,” which took place during the women’s protests in December 2020 and involved a white baclava-adorned artist carrying a large head of Kaczyński made in collaboration with Alfred Laskowski.

Łukasz Zbroja created a monumental metal sculpture from rusty pieces of garbage that unfortunately couldn’t be exhibited in Budapest. The art show also featured documentation of pieces by Yui Akijama, Kaja Wielowiejska and Ewa Dąbrowska. Site-specific actions often dominate in Cered – works referring to particular places, their history and nature. Artists often use found objects or create completely ephemeral actions linked to nature and local landscape.

The international character of Art Colony Cered revolves around artists from the V4 countries, namely Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Some of the most captivating pieces presented on this exhibit were made by Csaba Fürjesi, a painter, graphic designer and photographer from Hungary. His monochromatic paintings are composed of multiple overlapping layers and surfaces. Narratives are thus intertwined. The images look as if they were created in the screen painting technique and utilized press, archive or family photographs. Their multiplication, shifts and juxtapositions create collage images.

Eszter Palik is one of the founders of Art Colony in Cered who creates assemblages from objects she encounters during residency. These objects often consist of old, decorative frames filled with inflated pig intestines (that look like balloons) or artificial flowers. When illuminated, her compositions become interesting lightboxes. The pieces are quite somber, grotesque, posing as old historic objects. 

Tomasz Piars presented photographs of the houses in Cered in the form of collages. On these pictures, the artist decided to paint monochromatic geometric shapes in different shades of grey, which is his trademark technique. Typically, Piars paints large-scale canvases in the spirit of geometric abstractionism often dedicated to the theme chemical and biological processes. His paintings tend to remind one of computer-generated graphic images in line with the digital art aesthetic.

Jozef Suchoza, an artist from Slovakia, created a series of “post-photographs” – photographic collages imitating old pictures. There is an element of humor to most of them. The majority of individual pieces are inspired directly by the history of Cered. As part of the series, the artists pasted an alien ship, Godzilla or the Christ the Redeemer onto old photographs of rural landscape.

Despite a multiplicity of techniques and subjects, the exhibition has a shared point of reference – a small town with rich artistic history. And so, a number of artists used materials found on location or thematized the history or landscape of the region. The exhibition, or rather two exhibitions, could not contain all the thematic and diverse potential of artworks. Nevertheless, they were a worthy attempt. The whole event was accompanied by exhibition catalogues, published every couple of years by the organizers. Now, I myself feel compelled to visit Cered next year.

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