The exhibition, staged across multiple locations, explores how emerging and mid-career Hungarian women artists relate to the promise of the day after tomorrow inherited from previous generations. In the constantly reshaping battlefields, how do women respond, negotiate, and attempt to expand the narrow paths offered by patriarchy? How do they navigate private and public spaces, and the various systems of oppression, all while holding onto the hope of a better future? Do individual bargains lead to a collective solution, or have we lost this dimension? Tomorrow is still tangible, but will the day after tomorrow come?
The idea of women being constructed and confined to the private space—home and household—is deeply ingrained in the social and cultural fabric. This place promises security, but it is also interwoven with gestures of power: sometimes it speaks the language of force and power, sometimes that of flattering or romantic myths. In the public space, predominantly reserved for men, women’s status remains unclear, making them outsiders or intruders in social discourse and in institutionalized roles. While women can navigate through bargains and compromises, these strategies may bring partial individual security or autonomy but ultimately leave the fundamental part of the system untouched.
The exhibit is divided and installed across two locations: a private home, rented for the exhibition, and a former pharmacy, now part of a museum. The two spaces hold significant meaning as this area of Budapest’s 8th district is connected to the social trauma of prostitution. While society has removed this taboo from the streets, it has never tried to discuss it in a broader context.
What has also remained unspoken is how the social trauma of prostitution continues to impact the lives of all women, their lived experiences, and their place in society. It is crucial to consider how we initiate the resolution of the oppressive gestures against women in this geopolitical context, and what suggestions, juxtapositions, and overwritings occur. The exhibition’s two spaces create connections between inside and outside, private and public/social realms, individual experience and cultural representation. They establish contexts where female narrators appear, negotiating with patriarchy, resisting, dancing out, bending in, and displaying various strategies. Last but not least, visitors must walk between the two locations, engaging with this part of the district.‘Outside and inside’ serves as a fertile metaphor and recurring terrain for female-centered representations, revealing the networks of oppression through various instruments. Additionally, the female body itself is interpreted as an “in-between space,” embodying categories of permeability, vulnerability, fluidity, openness, wounding, exposure, and change. The exhibition also includes a large screening program and diverse public programming closely related to the topic and/or exhibited works.
Curator: Kata Oltai
Venues: József Ernyey Pharmaceutical History Library - Semmelweis Medical History Museum, Mátyás tér 3. (District 8) / Private flat in Koszorú utca 27. (District 8)
Opening day: May 8, 15.00–18.00
Open:
Mátyás tér 3.: May 8 – June 13, Thursday–Friday: 15.00–18.00
Koszorú utca 27.: May 8 – June 14, Thursday–Saturday: 15.00–19.00
This exhibition is organised in collaboration between OFF-Biennale, Sincerely Yours Space & Agency, Semmelweis Medical History Museum.
