As always, our goal was to provide our audience with ways to approach and understand those issues, methods and trends that interest the youngest generation of artists. The two key notions that provided our criteria of selection, empathy and manipulation, are manifestly there in contemporary art. It is with the help of this pair of concepts that this exhibition explores the complex relations of providing assistance vs. exerting pressure, of understanding, vs. making a conquest, of the other. We wanted to see the function of the empathetic (sympathetic, understanding, tolerant) and the manipulative (controlling, manoeuvring) attitude in the concrete works of young artists, as well as in their individual relations to the whole of art and our globalized world. Conspicuously, the works selected also reflect the international trends and current interests of contemporary art, while each tries to add its own local or personal layers of meaning. We, the organizers also carried out an experiment, and the results were surprising even for us. To name but one: no one seems to be innocent.
The exhibitors are artists who consciously reflect on the conditions of contemporary society, and who freely combine the different genres (painting, sculpture, graphic art, video, installation) to make critical works of a conceptual flavour that warn of, or use the very means of, manipulation.
Participating artists:
Stefan BALTENSPERGER \ GERŐCS Júlia \ GRUDL-TURI Gábor \ GYURKOVICS Anna \ Elena HABICHER \ HERMÁN Alíz \ HERMANN Ildi \ Florence JUNG \ KEREKES Péter János \ KISS Gábor Attila \ KNOPF Andrea \ KOCSI Olga \ KOÓS Gábor \ LAKATOS Áron \ MELKOVICS Tamás \ MOLNÁR Judit Lilla \ MOLNÁR Zsolt \ RÁDÓCZY Bálint \ ROMHÁNY Veronika \ David SIEPERT \ Monika STALDER \ SZABÓ Ottó \ SZIGETI Árpád \ TÓTH Márton Emil \ TÓTH Zsófia \ TRANKER Kata