On Friday, September 19, 2025, at 6 pm.,
artist Andreas Fogarasi will give a guided tour
at the exhibition Ocean II Ocean
by Cyprien Gaillard.
The guided tour is part of Trafó’s
transdisciplinary focus THE END OF VIOLENCE | Full
programme
The guided tour will be in Hungarian. Free
entrance, all are welcome.
Andreas Fogarasi (1977) lives and works in
Vienna, but always has been present in the Hungarian art scene. His art, which
combines documentary and sculptural strategies, focuses on points of contact
between visual culture—fine art, design, architecture—and social reality. His
works, which address the issues of representation, power relations in public
spaces, identity, and the relationship between culture and collective memory,
also reveal the influence of minimalist and conceptual art as well as
architectural thinking. In recent years, his artistic interest has centered on
the formation and visible manifestations of political, economic, cultural, and
sociological deep structures on various surfaces in public spaces (e.g., facade
elements, subway station surfaces, paving stones, windows, etc.) and in the
constantly changing structure of the city.
Andreas Fogarasi was awarded the Golden
Lion for his contribution to the Hungarian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale
in 2007 (with his video installation Kultur
und Freizeit, which reflects on the changed cultural status and social
space of Budapest's cultural centers) and the Otto Mauer Prize in 2016. His
solo exhibition Nine Buildings. Stripped was
presented at the Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna) in 2019, and his solo exhibition Skin City was held at the Budapest
Gallery in 2022. The audience of Trafó Gallery could see his works in 2020 (Agency of Undertones) and 2012 (Vasarely Go Home). His works has been
presented in numerous international exhibitions at, among others, Times Museum,
Guangzhou (2020), the 14th Fellbach Triennale (2019), mumok, Vienna (2019),
OFF-Biennale, Budapest (2017 and 2015), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2014), New
Museum, New York (2009), Heidelberger Kunstverein (2008), Kunstverein
Düsseldorf (2007), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2003), and Manifesta 4, Frankfurter
Kunstverein, Frankfurt/Main (2002).
Cyprien Gaillard: Ocean II Ocean
“Think of silence as a violence, when silence means being made a
frozen sea.”¹ – writes American poet Chen Chen – “…the right silence can
be an action, an axe right through the frozen sea”¹
Can
silence have an agency? Can collapse and decay have a form? What do the
ruins conceal? What is preserved on the fossilized surface of the past?
What drifts in the space between the marks of exploitation and the
abuse polluting the oceans? What is hidden under the surface of the
water?
Cyprien Gaillard's first solo exhibition in
Hungary takes viewers beneath the surface, where different materials
and sensibilities collide, whether it be the concrete bottom of an
artificial lake in the Parisian suburbs with painfully low water levels,
the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, or Soviet metro stations deep
underground. Gaillard brilliantly clashes different temporalities and
geographical locations, elements of the built and natural environment,
submerged histories and our daily lives, the living and the previously
alive, shedding new light on our present through fragments of the past.
His works embrace the beauty of gradual and inevitable decay. The
artworks featured in the exhibition reflect rhythms of different
materialites and contrasting times, blending fossil fuels with fossils
of the past and of the future. The rhythm of resigned and violent parish
oscillates, but in this rhythm, echoes of the future can also be heard.
Or as the artists refers to this with a quote from Vladimir Nabokov;
“The future is but the obsolete in reverse.”²
Hold your ear to a shell, and you’ll hear the ocean. Hold your ear to a fossilized ammonite shell, and you’ll hear time.
Cyprien
Gaillard works across a range of media including film, video,
photography, collage, installation and live performance. The seductive
audiovisual language of Gaillard’s films recalls the eighteenth and
nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic tradition of seeking the sublime
in images of ruins, catastrophes and topographical extremes. Yet his
works can also be read as socio-critical analyses of colonialism, of the
failed social aspirations of modernist architecture and the fluid
nature of capital in the age of tourism and gentrification. Or as a
meditation on how quickly we forget that all societies will eventually
perish, one civilization ineluctably yielding to another.
Cyprien Gaillard
(*1980, Paris) lives and works in Berlin and Paris. Selected solo
exhibitions include OGR, Turin (2024), Palais de Tokyo & Lafayette
Anticipations, Paris (2022), Fondation LUMA, Arles (2022), Mori Art
Museum, Tokyo (2021), TANK Shanghai (2019), Accelerator Konsthall,
Stockholm (2019), Museum Tinguely, Basel (2019), K20 Kunstsammlung
Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2016), Julia Stoschek Collection,
Düsseldorf (2015), MoMA PS1, New York (2013), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
(2013), Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2012), Schinkel Pavillon,
Berlin (2012), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011), KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin (2011) and Kunsthalle Basel (2010). Significant
group exhibitions include Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024), Fondation
Carmignac, Porquerolles (2022), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art,
Helsinki (2022), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021), Julia Stoschek
Collection, Berlin (2021), GAMeC, Bergamo (2021), Hamburger Bahnhof,
Berlin (2020), 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Fondation Vincent van Gogh,
Arles (2019), Cleveland Triennial (2018), Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018),
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2018), ARoS Triennial, Aarhus (2017),
The Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2017), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Washington, D.C. (2017), Hayward Gallery, London (2016), 13th
Biennale de Lyon (2015), 54th Venice Biennale (2011), Gwangju Biennale
(2010) and 5th Berlin Biennale (2008).
¹Chen Chen: Kafka’s Axe & Michael’s Vest. In: Chen Chen: When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. 2017, BOA Editions Copyright © 2016 by Chen Chen. BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org
Image credit: Cyprien Gaillard: Ocean II Ocean, 2019. HD color video with sound, 10:56 min © Cyprien Gaillard
© Cyprien Gaillard
Courtesy the artist, Sprüth Magers and Gladstone Gallery
