Welcome to the second episode of the third season of I Hope This Message Finds You Well, a podcast on curating hosted by Kris Dittel and Eloise Sweetman. In this season we are focusing our conversations around “the exhibition”. With our guests we discuss its status for curating, and whether we take it for granted. We want to dig deeper into the exhibition as a location for the display and reception of artworks, a space of representation and liberation, and its limitations.

In this episode, we are in conversation with curator, organizer, and researcher Eszter Szakács. We discussed her curatorial beginnings as a curator’s assistant to making the Curatorial Dictionary and her recent exhibition Dóra Maurer – SUMUS – We Are Together at De Appel in Amsterdam. For Szakács, the exhibition is a place of learning, as she says “When the exhibition is open, the work begins”. That work is learning from her mistakes to use as the launching pad for a new research and exhibition. The organizing work of making exhibitions and events political, which she discusses in her work with OFF Biennale.

The episode was recorded in August 2023.

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Show notes:

In this interview, we discussed & mentioned:De Appel https://www.deappel.nl/en/ OFF-Biennale Budapest https://offbiennale.hu/en/off-biennale-budapest/ Hajnalka Somogyi https://ccs.bard.edu/people/195-hajnalka-somogyi CCS Bard https://ccs.bard.edu/school Lívia Páldi, https://hvg.hu/360/20230728_nacionalizmus_idegengyulolet_eroszak_Paldi_Livia_kurator_A_Mu_interju Curatorial dictionary https://tranzit.org/curatorialdictionary/index.php/dictionary/ Lara Khaldi, https://soundcloud.com/ihopethismessage/i-hope-this-message-finds-you-well-lara-khaldiPaul O'Neill https://soundcloud.com/ihopethismessage/i-hope-this-message-finds-you-well-paul-oneill-s2-ep5 Maria Lind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Lind Documenta fifteen https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/ lumbung https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/lumbung/Dóra Maurer, SUMUS – We Are Together at De Appel https://www.deappel.nl/en/archive/events/1196-dra-maurer-sumus-we-are-togetherWorks and Words, De Appel, Amsterdam, 1979: https://www.deappel.nl/en/archive/events/143-works-and-wordsEszter Szakács, "State-Independent Art Institutions in Unsteady States: Con/Divergences of Postsocialist and Postcolonial Contexts", Artha – Journal of Social Sciences, 2021, Vol. 20 https://journals.christuniversity.in/index.php/artha/article/view/2980/2086