KIÁLLÍTÁSMEGNYITÓ: Cultivators of Life // Életművelők
You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition Cultivators of Life: Growing Seedbeds of Knowledge on September 5 at 4:30 PM at MODEM!
Programme:
The exhibition will be opened and guided tour led by curators Adelina Luft and Krisztián Gábor Török.
Reading in the garden: Readings from a Selection of Fictional Gardens by Harun Morrison, with the participation of actor István Papp (in Hungarian).
Audiovisual performance: blanche the vidiot.
The programme will be held in Hungarian and English, with interpretation provided in both languages.
Schedule
About the exhibiton:
The exhibition brings together artists, gardeners and researchers to explore cultivation as a way of producing knowledge and imagining new relationships with the living world.
Organized by tranzit.ro/București in partnership with MODEM and curated by Adelina Luft and Krisztián Gábor Török, the exhibition presents artistic practices that approach cultivation not simply as agriculture, but as a form of knowledge production, community building, and ecological imagination.
Bringing together artists, researchers, gardeners, and community practitioners from Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, the exhibition explores how artistic practice intersects with ecology, science, indigenous knowledge, and everyday forms of care. Rather than treating the garden as a metaphor, Cultivators of Life understands it as a living structure where relationships between people, plants, soil, memory, and place are continuously cultivated.
Participants:
Alex Bodea (Berlin), Annalee Davis (Barbados), Aterraterra (Palermo), Colectivo Suumil Móokt’aan (Yucatán), Fuzzy Earth (Budapest), Harun Morrison (London), Horia Bernea (Bucharest), Kitti Gosztola & Bence Pálinkás (Budapest), Marina Sulima (Groningen/Chișinău), Martin Piaček (Bratislava), Mónica de Miranda (Lisbon/London), de Onkruidenier Collective (Amsterdam), Orsolya Gál (Cluj-Napoca), PARI feat. Anang Saptoto (Yogyakarta), Raluca Popa (Berlin/Bucharest).
Cosmos Garden at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life (with contributions from Raluca Voinea, Eduard Constantin, Adelina Ivan, and others), the Seed Bank Garden (Adina Moise and works from Codruta Birsan), Uzura Garden (Ana Barbu), Studio-Garden Crețești (Delia Popa), the garden of the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Science in Debrecen (documented by Lilla Váczi) alongside research about the kertségek (the garden districts of Debrecen).
Gardens as places of knowledge
At the centre of the exhibition are six gardens in and around Bucharest and Debrecen that became sites of artistic research, exchange, and long conversations with those who cultivate them. Their everyday practices of growing food, saving seeds, repairing, gifting, and mutual care embody what scholars Joe Smith and Petr Jehlička have described as quiet sustainability—forms of ecological resilience embedded in daily life rather than environmental activism. Their significance lies in the social worlds they sustain, quietly weaving together families, friendships, neighborhoods, and communities.
Exhibition designer:
Terebinth
From these local contexts, the exhibition expands into a wider international dialogue, connecting artistic practices from Barbados, Yucatán, Yogyakarta, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Berlin, Bratislava, Palermo, London, Budapest, Chișinău, and beyond. Instead of proposing a universal model, Cultivators of Life brings together different ecological histories and situated forms of knowledge that remain rooted in their own cultural contexts while sharing concerns about biodiversity, collective memory, and future forms of cultivating life itself.
A two-year research programme
The exhibition concludes the two-year research and artistic production programme Cultivators of Life, developed by tranzit.ro/Bucuresti throughout 2025–2026 in partnership with MODEM. Conceived as a long-term research platform, the programme unfolded through artist residencies, public events in gardens, workshops, film screenings, field research, community meals, and the Conversations in Living Thought series coordinated by philosopher Ovidiu Țichindeleanu.
Much of the research was developed at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life in Siliștea Snagovului before expanding through artistic exchanges between Romania and Hungary, residencies at the Experimental Station and MODEM, and collaborations with communities whose cultivation practices became an integral part of the project.
This long-term process is reflected throughout the exhibition. Rather than presenting autonomous artworks, Cultivators of Life brings together works emerging from sustained relationships with places, gardeners, scientists, communities, and ecosystems.
The Gardens exchange
Alongside the artworks, the exhibition presents six gardens included in the programme: the Cosmos Garden at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, the Seed Bank Garden, Uzura Garden, Studio-Garden Crețești, and two gardens from Debrecen. Together, they form a living archive of cultivation, research, and exchange developed over one year across Romania and Hungary. The exhibition also includes documentation produced during the garden exchange processes by writer Irina Bobei, illustrator Maria Doni, and photographer and filmmaker Gabriela Cozma.
More than the conclusion of a research programme, Cultivators of Life: Growing Seedbeds of Knowledge proposes the exhibition itself as a place where artistic practice, ecological thinking, scientific inquiry, and everyday knowledge come together to imagine new ways of cultivating life.
________________________________________
Curators: Adelina Luft and Krisztián Gábor Török
Admission is free!
Everyone is welcome!
-------------------------
We reserve the right to alter the program. By attending, visitors consent to the recording of audio and visual media during the event, which may be used by MODEM for promotional purposes.
-------------------------
Cultivators of Life is a programme co-funded by the National Cultural Fund Administration (AFCN) in Romania. The exhibition is a project of the tranzit.org network. ERSTE Foundation is the main partner of tranzit.org.
The programme does not necessarily represent the official position of the National Cultural Fund Administration. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the programme or for any use of its results; responsibility belongs entirely to the beneficiary of the funding.
Center of Modern and Contemporary Art - Modemart
“The MODEM Center for Modern and Contemporary Art is a cultural institution with international connections, which has two main missions: the exhibition of the most significant 20th century Hungarian and international works of art, and the representative presentation of the current schools and progressive efforts of the contemporary visual art and culture as well as most respected Hungarian and international artists.”
The MODEM intends to realise those ambitious goals that the institution has set for itself during the start-up period.
With one of the best infrastructural conditions in East-Central-Europe, the MODEM is to be an essential part not only of the visual art scene but the whole cultural sphere. The art center is suitable to represent that the culture has high priority for the institutes and the whole town. Therefore, one of our basic goals is to make the MODEM a wider intellectual space and forum to where not only the spectators but also the artists return regularly with pleasure.
The primary point of view of the MODEM is the reconstruction of its character in the Hungarian art life, with the cooperation with new elements which strengthen the relation with the local and regional community as well as with the broader international cultural scene in a longer term perspective and form and run a multilevel and manifold network. We aim to create a brand new narrative which change the public opinion about the role of the contemporary art and make the visual art the part of the everyday life. An important goal of our programme is to represent the diversity of the contemporary art and to display the attendant art in different forms. In the selection of thematic exhibitions, not only the visual art gets into focus but the architecture and social science as well.
The Antal‒Lusztig Collection also plays a major role in the MODEM’s life, since it is permanent part of the ground floor exhibition room. The items of the collection are presented by newly arranged exhibitions twice a year. Furthermore, the professional and accurate cataloguing of the collection has started simultaneously as well.
