Artist: Áron Lődi

Curator:  Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács

Title: Metallurgia

​Venue: 1111, Budapest

Just like smelting iron ore, the recently crisis-ridden iconic steel plant Dunai Vasmű – during its exactly seventy-year operation – could also smelt into itself the peculiar economic and political history of Hungary, from socialist industrialization through Post-Fordism to the recent reindustrialisation program, from state socialist ideology through genuinely emancipatory modernist visions to authoritarian neoliberalism, from Soviet geopolitics through “Eastern Opening” to the Russo-Ukrainian War.

The exhibition ‘Metallurgia’ explores the country’s haunting past and various future-visions through the state of Hungary’s largest steel plant in the middle of a financial and identity crisis, building on the toolbar of “Industrial Gothic” (Bridget M. Marshall) and theories of New Materialism. Several early representatives of Gothic literature, a genre developing parallel to the Industrial Revolution, used their writings strategically to articulate the radical socioeconomical effects of industrial capitalism and its proto-Marxist counter-narratives through a popular and easily comprehensible artistic language.

Áron Lődi reactivates this aesthetic and political tradition in order to reveal the (spectro)political potential of the paradox temporalities and identities of the plant and the country’s strongest labour union, opposing the dominant dystopic horizon with speculative visions of emancipatory perspectives.