GUIDED TOUR OF VIGH VIOLETTA'S WORK/COMPETITION EXHIBITION
Violetta Vigh
WORK/VERSENY
"Mihály Hurai is the eternal fregoli. He always puts himself where he is needed most. [...] This man is incapable of doing a bad job."
(Clothing Worker, 1968, Volume 12, Issue 2)
In her solo exhibition, Violetta Vigh, a graduate student of MOME Media Design MA, explores the linguistic and visual representations of the productivity chase. Her main sources of inspiration are contemporary press materials on the working conditions of Hungarian socialist garment factory workers, which reveal a world of scoreboards, percentages, disciplined bodies and competition.
Schedule
Work competitions were of paramount importance in the economic policy of socialism, in which workers usually set unrealistic and unrealistic goals in order to increase their performance and exceed the centrally set norm by hundreds or thousands of percent. After the Stakhanovist movement, today the principle of unlimited progress and "anything is possible" dictates the pace and generates the competitive situations. How central is competition in our lives and how does it shape our identity? Where is the line between healthy and unhealthy competition? What are the parallels between work and competition? Is there such a thing as individual performance?
In the exhibition WORK/Competition, the idioms, imagery and symbols of the period under study are transformed into absurd metaphors of contemporary performance society in the form of installations and video works.
Curator: Noémi VISKI
Assistant curator: Júlia BÁLINT
Special thanks to: Dániel CSEH, Miklós ERHARDT, László HALÁK, Attila PÁLFALUSI, József TASNÁDI
K11 Labor
K11 Labor, established in January 2022 as part of the K11 Arts and Cultural Centre, is an inclusive space that aims to bring contemporary art and design closer to the city's audience through thematic exhibitions and other programmes."
