Drift - Tilo Schulz solo show

Opening speech: Ákos Birkás

18 June 2016 - 11 September 2016

Tilo Schulz (1972) is a Berlin-based artist and curator. His interest focuses on potential interactions between branches of the arts and on the diversity of audience viewpoints. In recent years, he has been addressing these issues through layers of meaning of the concept of movement, literally and figuratively.

Through an abstract idiom, he reflects on the general uncertainty experienced by people today. The lack of solid points results in displacement: not just physical movement and changes in position as with refugees and migrants, but the constant flow or ideas, thoughts and viewpoints. It is at this point that Schulz has discovered links between his own investigations and Kassák’s activities, one definitive element of which he identifies as movement. This manifests itself in Kassák’s European wanderings in his youth, the propagation of the experiences he brought home with him, and his artistic diversity, which resulted in the figurative crossover of formerly distinct branches of the arts and the shifting of their boundaries.

Is it possible to shift a painting from its physically and formally fixed status? Does this lead to a perceptible change in viewers’ attitudes? Schulz’s present exhibition Sodródás – Drift is based on the deconstruction and re-interpretation of his painting A rush and a push and the land we stand on is ours, shown in Berlin in 2015. Pieces of the cut-up picture, separated and moved away from their original positions, and two – similarly previously-shown – short films (Tied up and down, how to consider force a privilege, 2013 and Konsole, 2015), are complemented with exhibition elements that extend the diversity of viewpoints beyond the world of art. In the artist’s own words, the present exhibition is a call to apply several viewpoints simultaneously and instead of seeking a single indubitable truth, and to exclaim for the incorporation of varied viewpoints – the complex rather than the simple.

/Text by Boglárka Kőrösi/

Tilo Schulz has been active as an artist and curator since early 1990s. He has exhibited in the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Kunstverein in Hannover and at the 2015 Venice Biennale. He has also had solo exhibitions in Hungary – first in the Contemporary Art Institute, Dunaújváros in 2009, and in acb Gallery, Budapest in 2015.

Organizers: Eszter Őze, Edit Sasvári
Assistant: Boglárka Kőrösi
Graphic design: Áron Kútvölgyi-Szabó
Communication: Anna Juhász
Consultant: Renáta Szikra
Translation: László F. Földényi, Ádám Nádasdy
Contributors: Ferenc Badak, Attila Batári, György Mihalkov

Supported by acb Gallery