The exhibition explores the perception of reality, consciousness, and the purity and dark sides of the unconscious. The HAB exhibition spaces feature works by twelve artists that examine the dialectic of light and darkness, nature and man, presence and absence, and the boundaries between body and consciousness. Desolate landscapes, grotesque bodies, organic forms, and dystopian visions all invite the viewer to step outside their usual patterns and discover the unknown “beyond the beaten path.”
The exhibition takes as its starting point British philosopher Mark Fisher’s book The Weird and the Eerie, which describes the anxieties of modernity and late capitalism through the modes of perception known as “the weird” and “the eerie.” The exhibition explores the metaphor of stepping outside of the familiar: it presents works that reveal the instability of reality, the strangeness inherent in the familiar, and the creative potential of uncertainty, while providing a complex interpretive framework in the context of contemporary cultural disorientation, technological transformation, and ecological crisis.
In the curatorial concept of Zsófia Máté and Patrik Steinhauser, various aesthetic trends in contemporary visual culture, such as bioromanticism, eco-horror, posthumanism, and Gothic visuality, while also focusing on a radical constructivist understanding of knowledge and perception—the idea that reality is not objective, but rather emerges from the interaction between the observer and the world. Along these lines, the exhibition interprets darkness not as a deficiency but as a creative force: new realities are born in spaces of uncertainty, and the viewer himself becomes part of the creation.