ÁDÁM ALBERT: EVERYTHING IS OURS!

Opening: Wednesday March 28, 2018, 6.00 pm
Opening speech by Balázs Böcskei, political scientist


“Tomorrow everything will be ours

If so we wish, if so we dare.”

Endre Ady: Hungarian Jacobin Song, 1908

Ádám Albert delves into a particular historical situation to explore how political, economic and artistic ideas join forces in constructing social utopia. The exhibition focuses on May 1st of the year 1919 in Budapest, when the entire city had turned into a vast stage for a day. The programmatically designed spectacle of the period event with its monumental structures and artworks aesthetically represented a new world order. Digesting historical documents, Albert reflects on elements that visualised the ideal of equality and collectivism in the symbolic space. Evoking the clean functionalism of classical modernism, the installation made specifically for the spaces of the Kassák Museum directs attention to the complex bond between aesthetics and ideology.

The phrase Everything is ours! is a reference to the closing lines of rebellious Hungarian poet Endre Ady’s Hungarian Jacobin Song. When Budapest’s Margaret Island opened its gates to the public in April 1919 – a few weeks before, it had still been a restricted park exclusively reserved to the bourgeois elite –, the same quote was put on display to welcome visitors. Associating the tradition of the French revolution with measures of economic policy reveals how propaganda had become a tool of establishing a new society, intended to facilitate the large-scale dissemination of ideals related to radical left-wing politics.

Albert graduated in 2010 at the DLA programme of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts following his studies in history at the Károli Gáspár University. In 2007 he won the ESSL Art Award CEE. He is currently associate professor at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and director of the College for Advanced Studies in Art and Art Theory.

The font used in the exhibition was designed on the basis of contemporaneous signs by typographer Ádám Katyi.

The exhibition is part of the Kassák Museum’s research and exhibition programme Lifestyle and Social Movements of Modernism.

The exhibition is sponsored by Kisterem Gallery and the National Cultural Fund.