The Magic Wall lit up Hungary's most important avenue in the weeks leading up to the festive season. In November, our interactive video displays were used in a Polish-Hungarian art exhibition at the Polish Institute on Andrássy Avenue. This was the first collaboration of Back and Rosta Ltd. with a Polish museum.
Last year, in the autumn of 2023, we visited several Polish museums, and after encouraging discussions, we reached our first agreement at the beginning of the summer: as a result of that recently we installed a special Magic Wall, consisting of three vertical screens, for the Lodz-based Sztuki Museum in Budapest - said Miklós Rosta, CEO of Back and Rosta Ltd., about the first Polish-Hungarian cooperation in November.
Sztuki is one of the oldest modern art museums in the world. Their collection includes works by some of the most progressive representatives of the European avant-garde of the time. Today, Sztuki is the only cultural institution in Poland with such an extensive collection of 20th and 21st century world art. A delegation from the museum visited Budapest in the spring, and we were able to discuss the details with them in person.
The Magic Wall's interactive digital display was originally conceived as a four-metre-wide unit of six monitors. The task of the video wall was to introduce two similar art groups. Andrzej Partum (Warsaw) and György Galántai (Budapest) created archives of selected works in the 1970s. For the project Archiwa przyszłości (Archives of the Future), Sztuki's Hungarian partner was the Museum of Fine Arts - Central European Art History Research Institute, Artpool Art Research Centre.
The result of several months of collaborative creative process was a special selection of our Magic Wall, which consisted of three vertical “86size monitors, attached to each other in a shape of a folding screen, which we installed in the Platan Gallery, located in the Polish Institute on the busy Andrássy Avenue – also known as the "Champs de Elysee" of Budapest. Overlooking the crowded and historical street, the exhibition space promoted the work of famous Hungarian-Polish avant-garde artists for days.
The interactive and spectacular user-friendly displays showcased over 200 different highlights from the archive collection, consisting of videos and photographs of the two artist groups. The November event also introduced the activities of a joint project between Hungarian and Polish researchers.
Paulina Kurc-Maj, Deputy Director of Development and Promotion at Szuki museum delegated a team of three expert for the international project: Marta Pierzchala, from the Documentation Department, Marta Skłodowska, editor and assistant curator, and Maciej Cholewiński, librarian in the Documentation Department were responsible for the execution. They were supported by colleagues from the Artpool art collective as creative partners. Two of our colleagues from Back and Rosta’s Budapest office, Katalin Medgyesi-Frank and Dóra Szigeti, were responsible for the Magic Wall as project managers.
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