How Can We Hang On to a Dream?
The exhibition at aqb Project Space focuses on the late figurative painting of Ákos Birkás (1941–2018), in collaboration with the Ákos Birkás Art Foundation, which manages the estate and promotes the research and presentation of his life's work.
Schedule
The exhibition takes the inherent tension of the paintings as its starting point, exploring the interpretive possibilities that arise: the destabilization of the traditional certainty of the portrait; the period of press-based imagery and the subsequent painterly series; the face as a surface for social appearance; the potential for political readings within the public sphere of media images; as well as the specificities of painting regarding modalities of perception, the question of theme and variations, and the relationship between drawings and paintings.
The title of the exhibition—How Can We Hang On to a Dream?—is a paraphrase of a pop song. Tim Hardin's 1966 track was originally a love song, capturing the moment a relationship dissolves and a shared vision of the future slowly disintegrates. In that context, the question is largely rhetorical: what is the point of clinging to a dream that is already slipping away? Within the context of the exhibition, this question takes on a broader meaning: it is not merely a romantic metaphor, but a fundamental dilemma of the modern political imagination, applicable also to the perception of images. The portrait, the phenomenology of the social face, and the fragility of historical utopias hold the space and possibilities of painting between the promise of presence and medial uncertainty.
Curator: Krisztián Kukla
Graphic design: János Borsos
Collaborating partners: Ákos Birkás Art Foundation, Vintage Gallery
Supported by FabLab Budapest