curators´ talk
1/2008
Katalin Timár, curator and theorist, Budapest
Kultur und Freizeit: The Anatomy of a Project
Katalin Timár discusses various aspects of the 2007 Hungarian Pavilion’s project for the Venice Biennale. Andreas Fogarasi’s Kultur und Freizeit deals with the present situation of cultural houses and centres in Budapest, a situation that dramatically altered after the political changes of 1989.
Katalin Timár is a curator and theorist, a doctoral candidate in communication studies at the University of Pécs, Hungary. She works as a curator in the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest. Between 1999 and 2001, she was a founding member of a research group for contemporary art theory, based at the Department of Aesthetics at ELTE University, Budapest. She has served as program director of several international conferences and workshops. She was the curator of the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007 which received the Golden Lion Award for best national pavilion. Her fields of interest are photography and spectatorship, including postcolonialism and gender studies. She was the recipient of a Getty Grant (1999), a Doctoral Support Grant (CEU, 2000), and a Henry Moore Research Fellowship (2001).
Sophie Hope´s work inspects the uncertain relationships between art and society. This involves establishing how to declare her politics through her practice; rethinking what it means to be paid to be critical and devising tactics to challenge notions of authorship. Since co-founding the curatorial partnership B+B in 2000, Sophie has gone on to pursue her independent practice, with recent projects taking place in a Dutch new town, south London housing estate and Austrian cultural embassy. Sophie also writes, teaches and facilitates workshops, dealing with issues of public art, the politics of socially engaged art and curating as critical practice.