Antal Lakner: casa activa

Antal Lakner (born 1966) is one of the most important Hungarian artists whose career includes participations in the Biennale of São Paolo (2006), Manifesta 4 (2002), Venice Biennale of Art - Hungary Pavilion (2001), and Istanbul Biennale (1997). His personal exhibition at the Ludwig Museum Budapest in 2012 was an amazing incursion into a working model and experimental practice that completely transformed the museum space, the individual experience of visitors and the institutional boundaries. This pattern of work stems from overcoming the strictly visual reception of art, by creating situations where haptic knowledge takes control of experience and diversifies the interface of perceptual stimuli.

The exhibition casa activa. INERS atopia future home is based on a series of new works associated with already known pieces that respond to the specific context in which the Art Encounters Foundation is located – the proximity of the building site in which the blocks “of the future” are built. Antal Lakner's proposal, a futuristic vision of “active” living, rethinks the exhibition space as an alternative display home where each object determines a dynamic, challenging or surprising situation. The interaction of the public with the objects created by the artist calls into question the ability to transgress the comfortable territory of luxury and hyper technologized living. The atrophy of the human natural instinct to respond to hostile situations becomes the pretext for a set of questions about how we build our physical presence in a domestic or social space, the relationship between labor and leisure, and the ideological consequences of this separation. The "atopia" referred to by the subtitle of the exhibition, as Roland Barthes defines it, “a drifting habitation,” is an internal doctrine directed against total anchoring in one place and definitive association with a category. The concept of INERS, which Antal Lakner has used over the years, since 1998, as mechanical devices that translate physical work into recreational mimetic exercises, is developed here through new paradoxical dwelling practices of consumption and production in an everyday life converted in a perfect spiritual, energetic and economic engine.

Curators: Barnabás Bencsik and Diana Marincu
Partner and co-producer: Glassyard Gallery, Budapest