Who's Laughing Now?
Humor is an attitude. It is a catalyst, a mask, a crack in the order. Laughter can connect and hurt, expose and liberate. It appears in the wrong as well as the right moment—always ambiguous, always multi-layered. Who’s Laughing Now? brings together international positions in which humor becomes a method for transforming realities.
Schedule
The comic, wrote Adorno, breaks the spell of the ever-same. It opens cracks in the seemingly self-evident, shifts routines, destabilizes power. And yet humor is not just critique from the outside. As Simon Critchley notes, it also confronts us with our own limits: in laughter, we feel our fragility, the ridiculousness of the all-too-human, the failure at our own measure.
The exhibition unfolds within this space of tension: between irony and seriousness, grotesque exaggeration and quiet subversion, liberating outbursts and painful self-exposure. Humor here is not mere lightheartedness, but an ambiguous practice—a medium that reveals, unsettles, transforms.
Who’s Laughing Now? poses a simple yet difficult question: Who is laughing—and why? The echo of this question reveals the irreducibility of humor: its potential to clarify and confuse the present, to forge and dissolve community, to generate distance and closeness at once. Laughter is ambivalent. It is resonance, transformation, opening.
The exhibition is realized in cooperation with art quarter Budapest and Schaumbad – Freies Atelierhaus Graz, opening a dialogue, a "Rendezvous extended" between these two institutions.
Artists: Mrs Andrea Dudás Fajger / Anna Vasof / Beáta Szabó / Erik Mátrai / Franz Konrad / Markus Wilfling / Minaa Hakim / Norbert Tóth / Gudrun Lang/ Rafael Lippuner / René Corvaia Koch / Wolfgang Temmel / zweintopf and Anahita Neghabat (Meme workshop, finissage)
Curatorial Team:
Keyvan Paydar / Michael Schitnig / Krisztián Kukla
The exhibition will be opened by Fabian Ortner, Director of the Austrian Cultural Forum Budapest, and will be on view from October 3 to November 29, 2025.