Art that remembers
György Galántai’s and Júlia Klaniczay’s journey from the chapel in Balaton-boglár to Artpool
MúzeumCafé 24.
The Artpool Art Research Centre opened in a first floor flat at 10 Liszt Ferenc Square in central Budapest on 20 March 1992. Defining itself as the archive of avant-garde art, the centre led by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay could at last begin or rather continue legally its activity which had been confined to their apartment since 1979 for more than a decade. Last but not least, there was the utilisation of the growing archive. The initially illegal then ‘officially existing’ Artpool has organised and held several exhibitions. It has brought out publications and with its growing archive has proved to be a significant resource for scientific and research work. The double portrait outlines the centre’s past as well as its present. The exhibition Museum of Parallel Narratives, open until October in the MACBA Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, aims at presenting post-war avant-garde art in Eastern Europe together with collections documenting the period. The Slovenian curator Zdenka Badovinac presents the neo-avant-garde manifestations – such as performance or concrete poetry – from the 60s to the 80s not in themselves as isolated phenomena but as a typical reaction to their environments, thus exhibiting together geographically distant artists and art groups from the Eastern Bloc. Besides the collection of the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, four art collections from the region are exhibited by the curator – the projects of Július Koller (Slovakia), Zofia Kulik (Poland), Lia Perjovschi (Romania) and the contemporary art archive of the Artpool Art Research Centre founded by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay 32 years ago in Budapest. Artpool is the former organiser, collector and international reference point of non-official Hungarian art.