Consultants – BPR 2019
Consultants of the Budapest Portfolio Review 2019
Olivia Arthur
Olivia was born in London and grew up in the UK. She studied mathematics at the Oxford University and photojournalism at the London College of Printing. She began working as a photographer in 2003, after having moved to Delhi, and she was based in India for two and a half years. In 2006, she left for Italy to take up a one-year residency with Fabrica, during which she began working on a series about women and the East-West cultural divide. This work has taken her to the border between Europe and Asia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. She has received support from the Inge Morath Award, the National Media Museum, as well as the OjodePez-PhotoEspana Award for Human Values. In 2010, she co-founded Fishbar, a space for photography in London with Philipp Ebeling. Her first book, Jeddah Diary, showcasing young women in Saudi Arabia, was published in 2012. She continues returning to India – where her long-term work has been supported by a grant from the Fondation Jean-Luc Lagardère in Paris – and working in London, where she lives.
Lajos Csontó
Lajos Csontó is an artist whose works often make use of photography and videos. He has been creating artworks from his own images, found pictures, and textual fragments since the mid-1990s. The synergy of the oftentimes banal-sounding texts and the images yields a rather complex result that gives way to various interpretations. He has also experimented a lot with expanding the genre of the portrait, while he is interested in exploring the opportunities for utilizing collections and archives too, as well as the interaction between the myriad of digital images and the personal picture. He was awarded the Munkácsy Mihály Prize in 2007. His works have been showcased at several exhibitions in Hungary and abroad as well, and they are included in numerous public collections. Since 2006, he has been teaching at the Visual Arts Institute of the Eszterházy Károly University, and he was appointed the head of the institute in 2018.
Irina Chmyreva
Historian of photography; writer; curator of photography exhibitions. AICA member. Currently lives in Moscow. Since 1996, she has been curator and co-curator of over 200 contemporary group and solo shows and historical photography exhibitions in museums and art institutions in 26 countries. In 2012, she was one of curators of the main program of the International Biennial FotoFest in Houston, USA, titled Contemporary Russian Photography. She was jury member for the Syngenta Prize (2013) and for the Hasselblad Award (2014). Since 2007, she has worked at the National Institute for Theory and History of Fine Arts, Russian Academy of Arts, Moscow, and she presently holds the position of lead researcher. She worked as editor of several books and guest editor of magazines on photography. She is a writer on photography; her publications include chapters on Russian photography in The History of 20th Century European Photography (3 volumes, Bratislava, published by SEDF). She is author and co-author of several books on the history of Russian photography; her last book Collection of Essays on the History of Russian Photography was published in 2016. She runs lecture programs on visual communication and photography, and she teaches editorial work in photography in several high schools in Russia and abroad. In 2008, she was co-founder of the International Festival of Photography PhotoVisa in the Krasnodar region, Russia (www.photovisa.ru), and she has been its art director ever since. She is mostly interested in reviewing portfolios that push the boundaries of photography, including experimental works in multimedia and mixed media art; she appreciates seeing conceptional projects, as well as works connected with the history of arts. Chmyreva is looking for works that might be exhibited at the PhotoVisa festival and published in resources which she is connected with. As she has had a long-time experience in curating exhibitions and putting together books as an editor, she has much advice to offer on the editing and presentation of the results of one’s work at exhibitions and in publications.
Judit Gellér
Judit Gellér (1983) Curator. She publishes poems, art critics and art reviews in various Hungarian journals since 2000. From 2007 she is member of the Association of Hungarian Journalists; from 2017 she is member of AICA Section Hungary. She has been awarded her Masters’ Degree of Design and Art Theory Expert at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art Design. Between 2012 and 2016 she was member; between 2013 and 2015 she was board member of the Studio of Young Photographers Hungary. She started her PhD studies in 2013 on Film, Media and Contemporary Culture program at ELTE University, from 2014 she teaches at Photography Department and PreMOME at Moholy-Nagy University of Art Design. From 2015 she works as a curator at Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center. Her research fields are: private photo collections, artistic uses of archives, contemporary photography.
Ángel Luis González
Ángel Luis González Fernández is the founder and CEO of the PhotoIreland Foundation, dedicated to stimulating a critical dialogue in connection with photography in Ireland, and to internationally promoting the work of Ireland-based artists. He won the David Manley Entrepreneur Award in 2011 for the PhotoIreland Festival project. In 2011, he launched ‘The Library Project’, a public resource library of photobooks, which currently includes over 2500 items from more than 250 publishers worldwide. The Library Project also lends its name to a unique space in Dublin’s Temple Bar district, offering the above-mentioned library, an eclectic arts bookshop, and a rich gallery program. He has been a reviewer at events such as the Les Rencontres d’Arles, the Format Derby, the PhotoEspaña, and the Triennial of Photography Hamburg. He is responsible for books such as Martin Parr’s Best Books of the Decade, New Irish Works, and the ongoing TLP Editions. He contributed to the Landskrona Foto 2016, focused on Irish photography, and he is a guest lecturer at university programs, such as the Fine Arts Photography Master at IED Madrid.
Gőbölyös Luca
She currently lives and works in Budapest and Cologne. She has won and been selected for numerous national and international awards. Her work has been showcased in USA, France, Germany, Great Britain, Austria, Estonia, Romania, Finland, Slovenia, Poland, India, and Asia at events and venues, such as Expo Chicago, Ludwig Museum (Budapest), Istanbul Biennial, National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi), Vienna Art Fair, Walter Bischoff Galerie (Berlin). Gőbölyös’s work can also be found in various public and private collections. She studied photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (Hungary), where she received her MA in 1994. In 1997, she received the British Council Award from the British Government to study for her MFA in photography at the University of Brighton (1998). She completed her DLA studies in 2005 at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (Hungary), where she received her doctorate in 2009. She habilitated in 2016. Apart from her personal artistic practice, since 2009, she has been an Associate Professor, Head of the Photography Department at the Metropolitan University Budapest. She is represented by Knoll Gallery (Wien-Budapest).
Kozma Zsolt
Zsolt Kozma is a Brussels-based arts writer and curator working both in Brussels and Budapest. 1999–2017 co-founder of the art journal Műértő (Connoisseur); 2006–2012 co-leader and curator of the Videospace Gallery; 2007–2009 co-founder and editor of the Tranzitblog magazine; 2016– art director of the Inda Gallery; 2017– founder and head of the exhibition and cultural project organization Art of Care seated in Brussels. Writing: His writings on arts have been published in several publications, volumes, and catalogs, besides the paper and online journals and magazines Műértő, Tranzitblog, exindex, HVG, and HVG Online. Translations: Essays, studies, interviews on contemporary art, the theory of art, movies, or social studies, for several books, exhibition catalogues (for the Kunsthalle, the Ludwig Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, the National Trust of Monuments, the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts, the Museum of Applied Arts, etc. of Budapest) and journals (Műértő, exindex, tranzit.hu). Interviews with artists: Foreign artists (a selection): Wim Delvoye, Luc Tuymans, Peter Greenaway, Laurie Anderson, Steina Vasulka, Katarina Sieverding, Ulrike Rosenbach, Peter Callas, Thomas Israel, Ute Meta Bauer. Hungarians (a selection): Imre Bak, Emese Benczúr, Balázs Beöthy, Ákos Birkás, Attila Csörgő, Tamás Dobos, Eike, Ágnes Előd, Ágnes Eperjesi, Gábor Gerhes, Balázs Kicsiny, Tamás Komoróczky, Ilona Lovas, Csaba Nemes, László László Révész, János Sugár, Ágnes Szépfalvi, Attila Szűcs, János Xantus.
Rafał Milach
Rafał Milach is a visual artist, photographer, and author of photo books. His work focuses on topics related to the transformation in the former Eastern Block. His award-winning photo books include The Winners, 7 Rooms, and The First March of Gentlemen. Rafal Milach has received scholarships from the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage, the Magnum Foundation, and the European Cultural Foundation. He was finalist of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 and winner of the World Press Photo competition, as well as co-founder of the Sputnik Photos collective. His works have been extensively exhibited in Poland and worldwide, and can be found in the collections of the MoMA Warsaw, the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, the ING Polish Art Foundation, Kiyosato, the Museum of Photographic Arts (Japan), and Brandts in Odense (Denmark). Milach joined Magnum as a Nominee in 2018.
Szilvia Mucsy
Photographer, Chairwoman of the RANDOM – Association of Contemporary Photographers, director of the Budapest Photo Festival. She started her career at the Studio of Young Photographers in 1996, where she also held a leading position later on. She graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design as a photographer, and then studied photography at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Since 2003, she has been a member of the Belgian Young Photographers United. Besides appearing in the most well-known Budapest galleries, her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and at photo festivals of New York, Athens, Aix-en-Provence, Rome, Bratislava, Cluj-Napoca, Brussels, Sofia, Chaves, Amsterdam, and many other places. She received the József Pécsi Photography Grant on two occasions, and the photographic art fellowship of the National Cultural Fund. Her black and white work was published in the photo album Mediterrano in 2008.
Zita Sárvári
Zita Sárvári is an art consultant and curator in the creative fields with 10 years of experience. She finished her studies at the University of Pécs in Hungary and at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Currently, she is the director of the Erika Deak Gallery, which is committed to promoting progressive Hungarian and international art and organizes essential exhibitions in Budapest. Besides her managerial duties, she has also arranged critically acclaimed international exhibitions at the gallery. She is a curator of Société Budapest, a creative community initiative bringing together contemporary art and fashion. Focusing on connecting cutting-edge art with new audiences, Sárvári is mainly responsible for running the house’s residency program and developing its private art collection. She has vast experience in building private and corporate art collections, as well as in arts management and communications. She has organized numerous exhibitions from setting up the concept through design and visualization to promotional activities. In 2010 and 2012, she received the Deák Dénes Fellowship research grant for art historians from the city of Székesfehérvár, Hungary. She was a fellow of the Kállai Ernő Fellowship for critics and art historians in 2016.
Simona Vidmar
Simona Vidmar is currently employed as Deputy Director and Senior Curator at the Umetnostna galerija Maribor/Maribor Art Gallery in Slovenia, where her main responsibility is to curate exhibitions of national and international contemporary art, as well as to select and purchase art works for the Video Art Collection of the gallery. After completing her studies in Austria and Italy, she started her career as curator at her present institution where she assisted in major national and international exhibitions, and curated exhibitions dealing mainly with new media, video, installation, and sound. While studying Arts Management at the City University in London (MA) she gained experience at different London art institutions, and after returning to the Maribor Art Gallery, she was appointed to her current position. Since then, she has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions presenting contemporary Slovene and international artists in Slovenia and abroad, while she also produced several exhibition catalogues and contributed to specialized publications. In her projects, she researched mainly the fields of installation art, performance and video art. In 2011-2012, she worked for the European Capital of Culture Maribor 2012, and she was responsible for selecting, coordinating, and managing international visual art projects. In 2015, she was the Commissioner of the Pavilion of Slovenia at the 56th Venice Biennale. She regularly publishes articles and reviews in Slovene daily newspapers, art publications and magazines.
Duncan Wooldridge
Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer and curator, whose work explores the critical and theoretical intersections between art and photography, with a focus on experimentation, the materialities of the image, as well as image appropriation and sampling. He is the Course Director for Fine Art Photography at the Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London (UAL), where he runs an experimental program that begins with photography and branches out into installation, sculpture, performance, and a variety of media. He writes for art and photography magazines, including 1000 Words, Foam, Art Monthly, and Artforum, writing about contemporary art. In 2011, he curated the exhibition Anti-Photography at Focal Point Gallery, and in 2014, the exhibition John Hilliard: Not Black and White at Richard Saltoun, with a parallel book of the same title published by Ridinghouse. In April 2019, he will curate the exhibition Moving The Image: Photography and its Actions at Camberwell Space, London, including works by Discipula, Dafna Talmor, Taisuke Koyama, Louise Lawler, Liz Deschenes, Clare Strand, Kensuke Koike, Corinne Vionnet, Steff Jamieson, Edouard Taufenbach, and John MacLean. The Moving the Image show explores how photography moves beyond a conventional dialectic of stillness and motion, to become a complex intersection of movements, as the image slips, shifts, folds and scrolls, transmits, performs and projects into the future.