artists

• Ana Alenso

  ANA ALENSO

  Ana Alenso's artistic practice addresses the historical, social and environmental impacts of extractivism, global resource politics, and the trade of precious metals and fossil fuels. Her installations are often temporary and closed-circuit assemblages, consisting of sculptures, photographs, sound, and video. Her poetic, industrial, yet darkly dystopian work is usually preceded by extensive research and field studies. She participated in artistic residencies at Goethe Institut Chile, Villa Sträuli in Switzerland and Urbane Künste Ruhr in Dortmund. Recent exhibitions include: Geneva Biennale: “Sculpture Garden” in Switzerland, “Street fight at Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland; “Oil - Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age” at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; “The Garden Bridge” at Brücke Museum, “El Museo de la democracia” in NGBK and “Terrestrial Assemblage” at Floating University in Berlin. She holds an MFA in Art in Context from the Berlin University of Arts (2015), an MFA in Media Art & Design from Bauhaus University Weimar (2012) and an BA from Armando Reverón Arts University in Venezuela (2004).
  https://anaalenso.com/

  

  Ana Alenso’s work focuses on the former uranium mines of the Ore Mountains in the East of Germany. Interested in the wider geologic understanding of the past and today's geopolitical landscapes, she examines the significant role these mines and the Soviet-German mining company Wismut played in the race for “nuclear superiority” during the Cold War.

• András Cséfalvay

  ANDRÁS CSÉFALVAY
  András Cséfalvay (1986) is a visual artist, digital storyteller, mytho-poet from Bratislava, currently teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. After his studies of painting and mathematics, he wrote a dissertation on the usefulness and reality of fiction. He delves into the relationship between culture and technology, the political and ethical aspects of listening to non-dominant voices in world-interpretation. His latest works look at the relationship between astronomers and indigenous peoples in the construction of the Mauna Kea telescopes, the flight of dinosaurs as a technology for survival after the extinction and the re-categorization of the planet Pluto. He is a recipient of the Oskar Čepan Award for young visual artists, member of The New Centre for Research and Practice, is a co-founder of the Digital Arts Platform at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava.  He exhibited in KunstWerke Berlin, Art In General New York, Trafo Gallery Budapest,  Firstdraft Sydney, Karlin Studios Prague among other institutions.
  http://www.andrascsefalvay.com/

  Interested in the intricacies of science, knowledge, power, and our faith in progress, András Cséfalvay crafts an animated video opera in three acts, set in the underground tunnels of the Bátaapáti repository. Inspired by the story of Prometheus and Percy Shelley's lyrical drama "Prometheus Unbound", his mythological figures interrogate our desire to dominate nature and move from nuclear fission to fusion, in order to achieve the utopian horizon of unlimited energy.

• Krisztina Erdei with Dániel Misota

  KRISZTINA ERDEI
  Kristina Erdei is a visual artist born in Szeged, Hungary, currently living in Budapest. She graduated from the University of Szeged with a degree in Philosophy, and received her PhD in Multimedia Art from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design with a dissertation entitled "Fighting for your story, memory research and contemporary art in the 21st century". His broader interests include visual culture, interdisciplinary and collaborative art practices. She is typically concerned with the cohesiveness and connectivity of communities, looking for the defining characters that shape and enable collective action. Erdei is currently a student at the Eötvös Loránd University Doctoral School of Philosophy, an assistant professor at the Partium Christian University and an art critic for the Magyar Narancs weekly liberal magazine with a strong satirical tone.

  Krisztina Erdei is a sensitive artist committed to working with communities. She is open to different mediums, but basically works in the field of photography and creates her series with a critical approach. Her aesthetics are unsought, instinctive, often her image seems to be created randomly, while in fact she builds complex connections in her works. In her multi-layered series, which actively involve the viewer in the process of drawing conclusions, her strong yet sympathetic opinion evokes the basic values of humanistic photography, reimagined in a 21st-century's context. http://krisztinaerdei.com/

  
  DÁNIEL MISOTA (1992) is a filmmaker and media artist from Budapest whose work is concerned with the critical potential of film style. Upon graduating from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2022 he worked as cinematographer on various art, film and television projects across Europe resulting in notable collaborations with Joseph Tasnadi on his film ‘La Primavera’ and Talya Feldman on her multi-channel film installation ‘Psithurism’. His thesis film ‘Mária Kerényi, 41, July 1970’ — a reenactment of a propaganda film from the 1970s — has been presented in the exhibition ‘Re:Re: Artistic re-enactments, the art of re-enactment’ at MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art. He is currently working on his PhD on emancipatory cinematic forms.
  https://www.instagram.com/daniel_probablement/

  

  FROM GLASS HUT TO BEYOND RADIOACTIVE WASTE

  The research-based art project by Krisztina Erdei and Dániel Misota engages with the community of Bátaapáti. The work enables different generations within the community to add their personal stories to the official histories constructed by political and economic powers. Their installation, which portrays the village through short scenes, deals with the interwoven layers of past, present and future, highlighting the human and post-human context of the nuclear waste repository that opened on the outskirts of the village in 2011. 

  One of these scenes evokes the Apponyi family, a noble family that has been central to the history of Bátaapáti. This noble family owned large tracts of land in the village, and were mainly involved in viticulture. In 1840 they built a neoclassical mansion in the village, which became the center of economic life at the time. In the scene, illustrated with a still image here, a photographer takes a picture of the Apponyi family. Géza Apponyi and his family are played by another local family of high-standing. Instead of the Apponyi-Manor, the photo shooting was re-enacted in the current economic center of Bátaapáti, the nuclear waste facility, and its most representative hall, the visitor centre, thus creating a parallel between the economic processes of the past and the present. 

  

• Csilla Nagy & Rita Süveges

  CSILLA NAGY
  Csilla Nagy is a visual artist based in Galanta, Slovakia. Her practice is characterised by a search for ways and means of remembering. She often thematises the different layers and fragmented nature of memory, whether individual, family or collective. In recent years she has become interested in ceramics, integrating it into her artistic practice. She uses clay in conceptual and experimental ways, trying out ancient techniques or new methods, digging deep in the history of ceramics and exploring the latest technological approaches. She was awarded the Derkovits Grant, Visegrad Scholarship and Art scholarship of the Hungarian Academy in Rome. Since 2018 she is an Assistant Professor at J. Selye University, Komárno, Slovakia. https://www.csilla.xyz/
  
  RITA SÜVEGES
  Rita Süveges is a visual artist based in Budapest. Her practice is research-based, she works with communities through knowledge-sharing performative events, and for a white cube context she uses a wide range of installative media. Suveges's main topics are rooted in the ecological and climate crisis, her aims to repoliticize these issues into a societal understanding through the imaginative power of art. She is enrolled in the Doctor of Liberal Arts program of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. In her upcoming dissertation, she is questioning geoengineering and techno-optimism from a feminist perspective.

  She was awarded the TÓTalJOY Award, Smohay Award, Derkovits Grant, New National Excellence Grant, Visegrad Scholarship, and was nominated for the Strabag and the Esterhazy Art Award.

  She took part in residency programs in Cité des Arts de Paris, ISCP New York, Meetfactory Prague, MQ/Q21 AIR Vienna, Balatorium, Künstlerdorf Schöppingen etc. Having several solo and group shows in Hungary, in the international context she exhibited in Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Off–Biennale Budapest and Collegium Hungaricum Berlin among others.

  She is also a co-founder of xtro realm artist group, which since 2017 organizes reading circles, exhibitions, field trips dealing with the ecological theories that critique the anthropocentrism of contemporary thinking. She was an editor, author and designer of extrodæsia – Encyclopedia Towards a Post-Anthropocentric World, and the Climate Imaginary Reader. Süveges was a curator of ACLIM! part of OFF–Biennale Budapest 2021. She was also a board member of the Association of Studio of Young Artists between 2018–2021.
  http://www.ritasuveges.com/
  

  

  Csilla Nagy and Rita Süveges devised an artist-led field trip as part of SALT. CLAY. ROCK., inviting the audience to a performative-participatory gathering and communal pit-firing session to Boda, a possible site for Hungary’s final repository for high-level radioactive waste. Using this ancient technique to transform clay into ceramics, the artists created shapes and objects inspired by the nuclear fuel rods, which will be stored in the final repository. Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of "nuclear semiotics", they ask how we can imagine communication with future generations about the location and the toxicity of the nuclear waste repository.

• Sonya Schönberger

  SONYA SCHÖNBERGER
  Sonya Schönberger is a Berlin-based artist whose practice deals with biographical ruptures against the backdrop of political or social upheaval. The source of her artistic exploration are the people themselves, who tell about their stories in biographical conversations. This is how some archives were created, but also already existing, partly found archives flow into her work. Five years ago, she created the "Berliner Zimmer," a long-term video archive based on the stories of people in Berlin.
  www.sonyaschoenberger.de
  www.berliner-zimmer.net

  

  Sonya Schönberger deals with how mining intersects with the storage of radioactive waste in the former salt mine of Morsleben, which was transformed into the GDR's final repository for low and medium-radioactivity waste. Her work connects the particularities of salt with the socio-political situation of this small village located close to the former German-German border.

• Marike Schreiber

  Marike Schreiber (*1982 in Neustrelitz) lives and works in the Mecklenburg Lake District. She studied media art at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. From 2008 to 2019 she ran the Leipzig art space Praline, together with Air Merten and later Yvonne Anders, which was a place for participation-oriented formats and site-specific exhibitions.

  Marike is interested in the nature of scientific images, in the visual expressions of science: how the shapes and colors of data, models and metaphorical terms are translated into images. She is interested in how they can be seen as ciphers of a certain worldview – of ideas around being human and/or of nature itself. She uses these two-dimensional images as material for sculptures and installations.
  www.marikeschreiber.de

  

  Marike Schreiber investigates nuclear infrastructures, interested in the entanglements of the former GDR's first nuclear power plant in Rheinsberg—also the first in Germany to be entirely decommissioned—and the Stechlin nature reserve that surrounds it. The Lake Stechlin, famously described in a novel by German realist poet Theodor Fontane, has played an important role in cooling the power plant. The lake's excellent water quality and biodiversity have been studied by researchers since the late 19th century.

• Katarina Sevic

  KATARINA ŠEVIĆ is an artist born in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia/Serbia. She studied at the Intermedia Department of the University of Fine Arts in Budapest and lives in Berlin.
  
  Through her artistic practice and design projects she orchestrates texts, books, artifacts, locations and archival documents in order to investigate and reframe established canons and prevalent historical narratives and their relationship to the forms of making and thinking. She works interdisciplinary, making objects, costumes and performances. She has participated in diverse collaborative projects, initiated and co-founded independent art spaces in Budapest, edited and published numerous books. https://www.katarinasevic.com/

  

  Katarina Šević’s artistic and design research deals with nuclear semiotics and the limits of language, meaning and cross-species communication. Her participation in SALT. CLAY. ROCK. is two-fold: she is the author of the project's visual identity, while her artwork in the exhibition translates the complexity of feelings and facts around nuclear matters into objects, patterns and performative props.

• Dominika Trapp

  DOMINIKA TRAPP (1988, Budapest) graduated from the painting department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2012. Her practice has been characterized by a two-way interest: on the one hand, a sensitive painterly approach that allows for intuition and introspection; on the other, an outward-directed sensitivity that facilitates dialogues between communities in the service of collective self-knowledge. More recently, she has participated in the residency programs of Art in General in New York, the Erste Stiftung in Vienna, and FUTURA in Prague. In 2020, her solo exhibition was presented at Trafó Gallery in Budapest and Karlin Studios in Prague. In 2021, she participated at the 14th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius, in 2022 at the Manifesta 14 in Prishtina, and in 2023 at EVA International – Ireland's Biennial in Limerick. She is currently a multimedia art fellow at the Doctoral School of the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. https://trappdominika.hu/

  

• Anna Witt

  ANNA WITT, born in 1981 in Germany, lives and works in Vienna and Berlin.

  Her artistic practice is performative, participatory, and political, working with performative interventions and video installations. She creates situations that reflect on social structures and the political of our everyday in the context of care, labor, class, migration and gender. The body in relation to individual and collective experiences plays a central role in her works. Passers-by in public spaces, or specific groups, - including nurses, factory workers, inhabitants of council housing or members of a youth forum, are drawn into her experimental arrangements, usually in a directly physical way. She creates situations to initiate group decision-making processes, leaving space for individual articulation and improvisation. The performative strategies range from repeated imitation of coded gestures to the development of complex choreographies, emphasizing moments of emancipatory thinking and solidarity.

  In the last years, she took part in numerous exhibitions in Austria, Germany and internationally. Her work had been shown at SEMA Seoul Museum of Art; Secession Vienna; 1st Vienna Biennale at MAK; Gallery of Contemporary Art Leipzig; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Austrian Cultural Forum New York; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and at MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, among others and she had solo exhibitions at Museum Belvedere 21 Contemporary, Vienna; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, and Gallery Tanja Wagner, Berlin, at Marabourparken Museum Stockholm and Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina, Kosovo. She took part in Aichi Triennial 19, 13; Lux/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, London; 6. Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art and Manifesta 7 in North Italy and is the winner of the Outstanding Artist Award 2020; Otto Mauer Prize 2018; Art Prize ‘Future of Europe’ in 2015; BC21 Art Award in 2013 and Art Prize Columbus Art Foundation in 2008.

  

  Anna Witt has been doing research in the Wendland region, in the village of Gorleben, which has become synonymous with anti-nuclear resistance in Germany. In her performative and video-based work, she focuses on forms of protest and how they are inscribed into the bodies and biography of activists across generations, while also reflecting on forms of solidarity in the anti-nuclear movement and how it has shaped (West) German left-wing protest and politics.