Online exhibition opening, Plugged – Unplugged 2, MAGMA Contemporary Art Space, Sfântu Gheorghe, 2021. In the picture (from left to right): Szilárd Miklós, Vilmos Kotér, Attila Kispál.
Plugged – Unplugged 2
9 26 March 2021

The Plugged – Unplugged / ARTeast Archive project consists of digitizing the ARTeast Foundation’s archives and facilitating access to its components: exhibition catalogs, brochures, prints, press releases, videos in analogue format, correspondence between artists and project organizers, recordings of conversations and interviews, etc. The physical format materials in the B5 Studio exhibition space were created during the ARTeast Foundation’s 20 years & the artist József Bartha’s 30 years of art organizing and curating, and they are the testimonies of the development of local, Transylvanian contemporary art life. The viewing perspective may be historical, yet at the same time intimate, because of the personal level of interethnic cultural interaction that has mobilized the local community on a formal and informal level. The archive captures the social and economic changes of a time that transformed some artists into curators, and turned personal studios or places without a specific function into “artist-operated spaces”, exhibition spaces. Eventually, the archiving artist collected footprints of the events he was a part of or initiated – but he does not want to correct and take these materials to a museum, but to turn the archive into action, to reactivate as many elements as possible to prevent us from forgetting or ignoring them. The exhibition is part of the project Plugged – Unplugged / ARTeast Archive and focuses on the exhibitions, events from the archive.