Emese Zsuzsa Molnár
curator in residence April 2019, Romania /
Statement
In general as a researcher and curator I am interested in artistic works that are defined by different attempts to decentralize power and question its given forms. The main purpose of my stay is to contribute to the study and understanding of contemporary (and historically contemporary) artistic practices in which art expresses itself through beauty, purity of forms and harmony, but also unpleasantness and of criticism (social and political). I plan to focus on investigating the ways in which artistic creativity can play a central role in the transformation of society, or can create a space for criticism and reflection on the societies in which we live in and on their ideological foundations. It is a look at how the limits of art are regulated, a search for the permanent tension between the poetic and the political, between the social and the artistic.
My goal is to present a proposal that has a critical capacity, in terms of Didi-Huberman to create "a dialectical place", a so-called "denkraum", that works as a "war machine": that is, it has the potential to invite people to think and to reflect critically, because, paraphrasing Marie Orensanz, I am deeply convinced that "thinking is a revolutionary act[1]".
[1] Public work of Marie Orensanz, “Pensar es un hecho revolucionario” in the “Parque de la Memoria” in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Biography
Emese Zsuzsa Molnár (1986 Miercurea Ciuc, Romania) is a sociologist by training with a professional interest and formation on the crossroads of intersecting fields from the more theoretical such as gender and equal opportunities studies, towards the more performative like art and activism. In the past two years she has been a fellow of the Hungarian-Argentinean exchange program of the Argentine Ministry of Education, completing her MA in Curatorial Studies in Visual Arts (Curaduría en Artes Visuales) at the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
As a production assistant she participated in the organization, production and montage of the exhibition “Take Me, I´m Yours” curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Christian Boltanski in the framework of BIENALSUR, the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of South America organized by UNTREF in 2017 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
As a more recent experience she contributed to the collective exhibition “100 Years of Parallel Dialouge” which took place at the Art Museum of Cluj in august 2018, reflecting on the transformative changes of the past decades that affected the different ethnic groups living together in the region. In the framework of the MIMESIS exhibition she curated the works of photographer Zágon Szentes on changing identities in the context of migrating masses seeking for better opportunities or for a living in general, across the globe.
Molnár comes from the field of social inclusion and empowerment, having worked 4 years at the Open Society Foundations in Budapest, Hungary. Within the Roma Initiatives program her greatest contribution was the organization of professional meetings and conferences around the theme of anti-gypsyism that led to the founding of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC), the first Romani cultural institute with the main headquarters in Berlin.
She participated in several socio-cultural development projects implemented by ITD / CEPS Projectes Sociales in Barcelona, Spain working on issues of migration, social participation, European capitals of culture and storytelling. In 2011 she was part of the organizing committee of the International Theatre Festival "Interferences" held at the Hungarian Theater in Cluj, Romania.