Interval: AD HOC (ET NUNC)

The exhibition of Miklós Erhardt and the Media Design majors of MOME

Imagine that Dorottya Gallery, empty in form and content, survives intact in the pedestrian precinct dominated by Italian fashion stores, in the vicinity of luxury hotels. Authorities hitherto incapable of making a decision about its future now give up altogether, the cultural actors who worked on its former and present interim profile lose interest. It is this impossible situation that Ad Hoc (et Nunc), the last exhibition of the Interval series, tries to exploit conceptually.

Miklós Erhardt and students of the Department of Visual Communication of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design wanted to see how a collective process can create an artistic reaction to a given theme and exhibition space, as well as to the context represented by the space, using chiefly background design and installation elements, whose target audience is not particularly well-versed in contemporary art and institutional critique, has only a temporary commitment towards the urban environment, but is, within the given limits, genuinely interested. In the course of a workshop in exhibition design they studied the history of Dorottya Gallery and the Interval series, examined the space, assessed the available materials, and then set to the struggle that all joint (an essentially aimless) creative work is bound to involve.

Mihály Csokonai Vitéz’s comic epic, Dorottya, has offered itself as a source of inspiration for approaches to the history and present status of the gallery. Unable to find a husband (operator), the eponymous heroine stages a little performance to give fate an impetus: from a chamber pot and keepsakes, she builds an installation, and then mounts a pyre from locks of hair, dance cards, billets-doux and myrtle wreaths, which she sets fire to with sulphur candles, in the company of fleas, before trying to divine her future from cards and making strong vows...

On hearing her Amor merrily laughed
Cracking a small thunder on the left,
Helping Eris to scale the abyss,
And thence onto the offering to piss.

(Mihály Csokonai Vitéz: Dorottya, or The Victory of the Dames at the Ball, Book Two)