For years, the Tűzoltószertár Living Gallery has been promoting mental health, self-awareness, and community building through the visual arts, but this year I expected the theme of “school” to connect a wider audience than ever before, regardless of age or gender.
We scratched, drew, wrote haikus on turquoise school desks, connected over the exhibition objects, created performances, and had mini but all the more realistic conversations about our changing external and internal worlds in the context of the digital revolution. As usual, we immersed ourselves, we did not shy away from drama, but everything was playful, festival-compatible, and valley-like…

I admit that I treat the programs as works of art equivalent to the artworks themselves, which is why I make the same signs in the exhibition space every year as I do to display the titles of my artworks.

I am proud to share the page of the program booklet relating to Tűzoltószertár in the image material, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all my performers, art therapists, and artist friends for participating in my brainchild. 🙂

I wrote this text for this year’s series:

There are certain Great Encounters that have an impact on our entire lives and often definitively determine our relationship with the world, the community, and “things.” These are Encounters with people, events, or works of art, some of which truly become decisive. What makes such a fateful moment, such an encounter, happen? In my case, becoming a visual artist was determined by an encounter with a doodle: when I was about eleven years old, I saw a face scratched into a bench in the choir room. From then on, for years, I drew the unknown artist’s doodle everywhere, without even understanding why it gave me such pleasure. (OK, I still draw while talking on the phone.) With the Suli series, I draw attention to school as a cultural and psychological “incubation space” known to everyone, where people exist in their most sincere, vulnerable, and open state, where they encounter people and phenomena in such a way that they become permanently connected or separated from things. Through the works and programs, I invited visitors to remember their own school-age encounters, and I presented school not as a “place of education for life,” but as the most defining physical, psychological, and sociological space of our lives. With this in mind, and with this responsibility, it is worthwhile to be a student, to connect with young people, to plan education…