Ember Sári Időben történik
Sári Ember presents a summarizing exhibition in the acb Gallery space. The exhibition can also be interpreted as a personally motivated questioning of the future, in which the artist looks back on the last seven years of her creative career, selecting from the archaic motifs of collective memory. The shift away from the photographic genre and the broadening of the medium of creative practice also coincide with the period under review in the exhibition, in which the characteristic and variable constellations of stone sculptures and ceramic objects have become Ember's trademark through spatial objects. The portrait, which is roughly contemporary with the history of representation, is complemented in his stone and ceramic works by such familiar and fundamental symbols of culture as the eye, the reclining figure, the human couple, fire, water, wood and animals. The comprehensive ceramic object ensemble presented in the exhibition Happening in Time, as well as the tent enclosed by the objects, evokes the atmosphere of the spaces of home, articulated through the artist's personal approach as a generational questioning.
Schedule
The temporality of the exhibition's title refers not only to the personal life of the artist, but also to our visual heritage, which goes back thousands of years, through the cultural and historical references of the motifs. The artist, who is in his late thirties and has more than a decade of creative practice behind him, explores the question of ageing and passing away as a young parent. From a formative period in his life in which questions of professional reckoning, choosing a partner, having children, making a home and coming to terms with settling down are typical of his contemporaries. Ember's ceramic works evoke the utilitarian objects of the intimate spaces of the home, as well as the ornaments of family representation. The silk tent, interspersed with a series of vases, glasses and souvenirs, can be interpreted as both a sleeping room and the burial site of an archaeological dig. In each case, the objects presuppose a human presence, sometimes at the essential level of sustenance, sometimes at the abstract level of memory-keeping and ritual practices. Moving on from the intimate present of the family home, the objects of a future fictional heritage seek their place in someone else's life, or rather in the white cube spaces of a museum or gallery, permeated by the confrontation with the passing of a personal reading expanded into a collective experience. What contemporary art and ritual practices have in common is that they have no concrete social utility, yet they are fundamental tenets of human culture that enrich our knowledge and experience of life from generation to generation. Sari Ember's solo exhibitions over the past half decade have almost without exception explored the themes of death, mourning, intergenerational relations and impermanence (Longevity 2019, Gloriuos Times 2020, Bread is made of Stone 2020, All is dissapearing 2022) in the form of ritual object ensembles placed in a contemporary art context. Her current exhibition is part of this lineage, in which she is coming to terms with her own ageing, after a period of mourning for her ancestors and their loss. The artist's 'skin-on-skin' exhibition interior, dominated by a pinkish body colour with pigmented spots, synthesises the artistic programme of the past period by capturing ageing through the changes in our own bodies.
Sári Ember (1985, São Paulo, lives and works in Budapest) graduated in photography from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Her practice spans a range of media, including stone, ceramics, textiles, photography and paper collage. Ember's work uses the narrative capacity of constellations of objects to not only question the nature of representation, but also to deconstruct classic genres such as portraiture and still life. Drawing on personal and collective histories, his works offer interpretations of memories, traditions and rituals. He was awarded the Campari Art Prize in Turin in 2017 and the Leopold Bloom Art Prize in Hungary in 2019. He has participated in several residency programmes, including AIR FUTURA in Prague, Q21 / Museums Quartier in Vienna, Litomyšl Symposium in the Czech Republic, Labmis residency and Tofiq House Atelies in São Paulo. His work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions in São Paulo, New York, Paris, Łódź, Brno, Berlin, Bratislava and Budapest.
acb Gallery
Founded in Budapest in 2003, acb Gallery has consistently grown in the past two decades establishing itself as one of the leading actors in the Hungarian and Eastern European art market. Initially, the gallery’s focus was on Hungarian and international emerging and mid-generation neo-conceptual artists, who became active after the political changes in the former Eastern Bloc in 1990. Since then, the gallery has expanded its focus, and now represents numerous Hungarian neo-avant-garde artists who have left their mark on art history since the 1960s and 1970s, as well as members of the youngest generations beside the already established ones.
Since the autumn of 2022, acb runs three exhibition spaces: the main gallery space, acb Attachment, which serves as a project space, and acb Plus, dedicated to large-scale solo and group presentations.
acb’s research and publishing department, acb ResearchLab was founded in 2015. This platform within the gallery aims to fill the gaps in the reception and publication of Hungarian neo-avant-garde and post-avant-garde oeuvres by studying bodies of works and art phenomena previously treated as peripheral.
The gallery holds significant importance within the global art market, actively promoting its artists nationally as well as internationally and engaging in art fairs, such as the Art Basel in Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, the Frieze Masters London or the ARCO Madrid.
