October focuses on the intertwining of public and personal life, with a special emphasis on women’s perspectives. The dialogue between historical and contemporary positions highlights these connections. The escalating violence around the world and the war taking place in our immediate environment are inspiring more and more artists to speak out. Many of them, in collaboration with other cultural workers, maintain creative resistance even under difficult circumstances, often amid attempts to silence them.
October highlights inequalities and the fragility of connections between internal experiences and shared histories from different identities and positions. The exhibition connects personal stories and memories, forms of survival and resistance, while showing the lasting effects of war: landscapes and bodies that preserve the traces of years burdened by cruelty and deprivation as an archive. Here, artistic work is observation and documentation, struggle and resistance: a radical act of thought, a silent testimony, a gesture that inspires action.
With its modest means, the exhibition pays tribute to the life’s work of Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), whose central themes were social advocacy and anti-war activism, which remain relevant today in terms of both social advocacy and anti-war sentiment. In her engravings and drawings, Kollwitz depicted with radical empathy the daily struggles of the working class and the urban poor, especially marginalized women: hunger, disease, infant mortality, and the violence of war. Her unwavering commitment to social justice makes her art a defining starting point for the exhibition.
Lívia Páldi