The OFF-Biennale Budapest: premiera, dyskusja artystyczna i wykład
The OFF-Biennale Budapest presents:
18.00 Online premiere: HÍRDALCSOKOR (NEWS MEDLEY), a new video work by Alicja Rogalska, with Katalin Erdődi, Réka Annus and the Women’s Choir of Kartal
18.15 Artist talk: Nikolett Erőss (OFF-Biennale Budapest) in conversation with the artistic team and members of the choir
19.00 Lecture: Stages of Solidarity. Building, Working, and Meeting in Central Europe's Villages Since Late Socialism, by Tomasz Rakowski, anthropologist (Warsaw), followed by a Q&A
Saturday 14 November 2020, 6pm CET / 5pm UK
Online event on Zoom / Live stream on Youtube
In English
The links to the Zoom-meeting and the Youtube-stream will be shared on the OFF-Biennale website and in the Facebook event on 14 November, the day of the event. To receive the links via email, please register: registration@offbiennale.hu
“We are not made of sugar, we are from concrete.” (Women’s Choir of Kartal)
Shortly before the first wave of lockdowns in March 2020, London-based Polish visual artist Alicja Rogalska, curator Katalin Erdődi and folk singer Réka Annus collaborated with the Women’s Choir of Kartal, a village near Budapest in eastern Hungary, to create NEWS MEDLEY as part of the OFF-Biennale.
Inspired by the rich tradition of folk culture, in particular folk singing in Hungary, NEWS MEDLEY talks about life in the countryside, as experienced by different generations of women. It recounts changes in political systems and lifestyles, and the hard-working realities of everyday life, commented on with humour and sharp wit by the choir members. A medley of five songs was chosen from the choir’s repertoire and collectively re-written, bringing together personal stories with collective concerns about community life and the future of the village.
NEWS MEDLEY combines traditional local melodies with contemporary lyrics: it resists the tendency to regard folk songs as fossilised cultural heritage and instead re-introduces the vernacular practice of revising and re-writing songs to talk about the pressing issues and emotions of the current moment.n times of polemic changes in the Hungarian media landscape and increasingly centralized information politics, NEWS MEDLEY experiments with folk songs as a form of grassroots “community broadcasting”, amplifying a heterogeneity of voices, while also asking what qualifies as news nowadays, which topics warrant media attention, especially with the rise of clickbait journalism.
Following the online premiere and a conversation with the artistic team, the anthropologist Tomasz Rakowski, currently a visiting fellow at the IWM in Vienna, will talk about his on-going research of rural society in the context of postsocialist transformations, and his work on experimental methodologies in anthropology, often involving fieldwork done in collaboration with artists and cultural animators, who initiate manifold dialogues with local communities.