Paralell Hungary is a cooperative project of doctoral students studying within the framework of the Stipendium Hungaricum at the Doctoral School, Hungarian University of Fine Arts, which was taking on between 30th of January 2020 – 14th of February 2020.
The scholarship allows for a 4 year study scheme in Hungary for students applying from countries outside of the European region, from Latin-America to the Far-East. The artists arriving from non-European countries have such cultural, social, political experiences, can observe such parallel worlds, which are not necessarily sensible or noticeable for Hungarian citizens. In the present exhibition, the doctoral students’ artworks point at cultural and social differences which can be seen from the critical perspective of their own divergent cultural background. The exhibited pieces function on multiple levels in which the divergent cultures open up the possibility of interpreting and understanding each other in a playful way through these reflected differences. The experience of one’s own cultural strangeness, and thus the reflexion on one’s own cultural identity gains a special emphasis, because this is the experience these young artists had to face in the first year of their studies. The works reflect on several facets of this experience of cultural otherness, yet the interplay of these different standpoints or aspects show the divergent attitudes, thought structures, perspectives not only of the artists arriving from divergent cultures but also of the culture they reflect on.
The query of the exhibition is what correlation, if any, can be found in the place , or the locality of a person and his or her identity; what it means to be at home at a certain space, how a specific place construes one’s identity (Castells), what social bonds can a place render, what it means to be cut away from those bonds, or whether the fashionable thought of “universal statelessness”, or the universality of the nomad way of life is a valid claim today.
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Curators: dr. habil Tünde Varga, associate professor, Margit Koller, artist, DLA student
Exhibiting artists: Tarek Arabi & Hanan Saif (SY), Cecília Bandeira (BRA), Manuel F Contreras (CO), Zahra Fuladvand (IR), Pallavi Majumder (IN), Volkan Mengi (TR), Tra Nguyen (VN)
