‘Don’t lay him on me…’

In her solo exhibition, Dominika Trapp focuses on and stretches the boundaries defined by folk culture. Looking behind the ideals conveyed by folk music and folk dance, as well as behind the discursive, symbolic and somatically engrained elements of rural culture, the exhibition attempts to reread these communal norms from a present perspective. The installation also explores the chains of meanings folk culture can be embedded in, the extent that its boundaries can be widened to, and how can it be inhabited by certain individuals and communities.

The exhibition highlights the influences and implications of radical detours of folk traditions, as well as examples of appropriations of and consensually accepted norms on different bodies (the body of a female folk dancer, the body of a peasant woman, the body perceived as a fetish object, the body of the dead), and thus articulates a multi-layered critique that turns towards the archaic in order to find a way out of the crisis of the present.

The exhibition can also be regarded as a faction of the hungarofuturist project, a statement event of hungarofeminism. The hungarofuturist project reverts to the past in order to detour the future, it seeks the local in the universal and the shared experience that can withstand divisions. This approach is associated with a feminist point of view that criticizes the structure of the public domain, hegemonic discourses, and the knowledges concerning the body. Hungarofeminism therefore maps, distracts, expands the contact points of the somatic and the social, giving space to time travel either on the plane of traumas or in mythical times.

Contributors: Richárd Kránicz, Balázs Prokk, Orsolya Bajusz, AU Workshop (Dénes Emil Ghiczy, Lukács Szederkényi), Ildikó Kele, Noémi Varga, Kata Szívós, Alina Vincze, Dávid Erdélyi, Ágnes Hardi, Ágnes Trappné Simó, Jánosné Trapp, Mihályné Simó

Special thanks: Panni Csoóri, Ádám Havas, Márton Bertók, Cara Spelman