As the guest of honor of the 2010 Budapest Spring Festival, Denmark has not only brought royal sounds, classical moves, Andersen tales and ground-breaking acting but an exhibition titled Power Games, which aims to raise awareness of certain social and political issues and explore the role of contemporary art as a channel of interpretation and processing.
I’m going to be honest, I arrived to the Ludwig Museum with great expectations as I think initiatives like PowerGames are now more important than ever. Not so much to raise awareness of certain contemporary socio-political issues – I guess many of us have personal experience with things like the economic crisis or political radicalism, unfortunately – but more because society needs art, contemporary art if you like, to help us process these problems and ultimately-hopefully to help coming generations find solutions. And PowerGames was said to explore the role of arts in the above-mentioned.
That’s exactly why I was disappointed. No question about the creativity of the works or the diversity of themes presented by the exhibition. Even more, the opening piece of the collection actually raised my expectations higher. The work of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, titled When a Country Falls in Love with Itself shows Denmark’s national symbol, the little mermaid staring not at the sea, but herself in a mirror. This delicate twist is thought-provoking as well as witty and what was the most important for me was that the message did not get lost in artistic indulgence. Same goes for art group Bosch&Fjord’s installation involving 50 traffic boards (really) aiming to encourage social dialogue on the functions of public places and our rights to them. The signs suggest new ways of using public spheres, the like of Kiss Zone, Prayer Zone, Rest Zone, Rainbow Zone or Waste Zone. Once again, attracting attention easily, the installation did manage to push through its message.
However, the rest of the works seemed to have fallen victim to artistic over-intervention. For instance, Ann Lislegaard’s light and sound installation – apparently trying to raise attention to the pressing issues of interpreting the past and the necessity of self-scrutiny, but I only found that out from the exhibition’s booklet – failed to push its original message through as I was distracted by decoding the (too) complex artistic language and channel. Unfortunately, this was the case with most of the exhibited projects. But I’ve got to admit, I haven’t stopped thinking about the meaning of some of them. Maybe that’s another point of the whole initiative.
Exhibiting artists and art groups: Bosch & Fjord, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Tue Greenfort, Jens Haaning, Ann Lislegaard, Tanja Nellemann Poulsen, Katya Sander, Superflex
Power Games Exhibition
Through May 30
Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art
1095 Budapest, Komor Marcell utca 1.