Two exciting new exhibitions are coming soon to the MODEM Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. On 20 July, a retrospective exhibition of sculptor Mária Berhidi, who died last year, opened, and from 3 August, the video work Rumi Dreams by acclaimed Turkish multimedia artist Anadol Refik will be on show.
Remembering the present – Mária Berhidi’s life exhibition
20 July 20, 2024 – 11 November 2024
Mária Berhidi’s retrospective exhibition, opening in the second floor exhibition space of MODEM, aims to reveal the full extent of the late artist’s somewhat hidden, at once sensitive and sensual conceptual-minimalist sculptural oeuvre, her personal and professional collaboration with fellow artists (Mariann Imre, Ilona Lovas, Kamilla Szíj, Erzsébet Vojnich) and her influential work as an art organizer. To evoke the latter, thirteen artists from his curatorial period at the Óbuda Society Gallery have been invited to participate in the exhibition.
In her first period, Mária Berhidi mainly created female body torsos, which presented female sensibility, corporeality and sexuality in an individual voice, in their own right. These erotic works, which demand tactility, transforming the stone into a skin-like surface, are typically unstable, often mobile and always retain some of the raw surface of the stone, indicating the natural origin of the material and inspiration. Later on, the body torsos were replaced by quasi-geometric compositions in a minimalist formal language, where the stone used – Berhidi deliberately created using waste from quarries, so-called ‘windstones’ – was at the limit of its physical tolerance: his works are ‘dangerous’, fragile, and their balance is maintained in extreme ways.
Around the turn of the millennium, her art turned towards installations composed in space, and her use of materials became more varied: in addition to stone, wood, textiles, metal and found objects were used to create these monumental works, mostly room-sized in scale, in which – as in her early works – personality reappeared.
From 2007 to 2007, she was the artist curator of the Óbuda Society Gallery for 15 years. There is a lot of overlap between her curatorial program and the objectives of MODEM. On the one hand, it promoted the youngest generation of artists and the presentation of rarely publicised works, and on the other, it gave space to installation art and, in particular, to contemporary sculpture with an individual voice.
The exhibition Remembering the Present provides an overview of Mária Berhidi’s unique art and introduces her generational co-creators and the points of intersection of her curatorial approach.
Exhibiting artist: Mária Berhidi
Participating artists: András Cséfalvay, Ágnes Deli, Balázs Faa, Mariann Imre, Margit Koller, Endre Koronczi, Áron Kútvölgyi-Szabó, Ilona Lovas, Csilla Nagy, Sára Richter, Gábor Roskó, Ádám Szabó, Borbála Szanyi, Kamilla Szíj, Péter Türk, Ottó Vincze, Erzsébet Vojnich
Curators: Szabolcs Süli-Zakar – Gábor Andrási
Refik Anadol: Rumi Dreams
3 August 2024 – 29 September 2024
Refik Anadol is the star creator of contemporary art, the first solo exhibition of his work in Hungary. In 2023, he transformed Las Vegas’ Sphere into the world’s largest AI-generated artwork, while his swirling, mesmerising light show was on display at New York’s MOMA for a year, and at the end of the year Anadol made the Grammy Gala unforgettable with his spectacular stage show.
This August, the video work of the acclaimed Turkish multimedia artist Rumi Dreams will visit Debrecen. Refik Anadol is a Turkish digital/new media artist living in Los Angeles since the early 2010s, a pioneer of AI art applications, a recipient of numerous international awards and a leading figure in contemporary visual arts. From airports to concert halls, from public spaces to world-renowned contemporary museums, his large-scale works have been exhibited in venues from Charlotte, North Carolina, to the Venice Biennale, Istanbul, Seoul and Melbourne, and around the globe. Istanbul-born, American-based artist Rumi Dreams, a large-scale, 32 m2 LED wall video work by Istanbul-based artist Rumi, is on show at MODEM in memory of the 13th century Persian poet, philosopher, scholar and Sufi mystic Mevlana Jallaludin Rumi. The exhibition aims to illustrate how digital and traditional art can be mixed to create an immersive experience. Rumi Dreams is also part of MODEM’s series of projects in which literature, one of the most important elements of Debrecen’s cultural identity, is allied with literature, offering new opportunities for interaction between different artistic disciplines.
As part of the Turkish-Hungarian Cultural Year 2024 and the 58th Debrecen Flower Carnival, the exhibition of Refik Anadol, the world-renowned Turkish media artist, will be one of the highlights of the event, which is being held to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Turkish-Hungarian diplomatic relations.
The exhibition at MODEM is a collaboration between the Municipality of Debrecen, the Municipality of Konya, the Turkish Embassy in Budapest and MODEM Debrecen.
