Contemporary chair studies by Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop

Exhibition opening: 22.10.2023. 6 pm
Opening speech by dr. Péter Granasztói, Deputy Director-General for Collections

The exhibition is open from 22.10.2023 to 26.11.2023.

The Chair pairs exhibition opened last autumn at the Museum of Ethnography as a chamber and travelling exhibition. The starting point for the exhibition is the Collection of Furniture and Lighting from whose seating furniture, seating platforms, chairs and stools the Budapest-based architecture office Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop has designed contemporary chairs. In the House of Arts in Veszprém, the exhibition not only takes a new form, but also includes a new chair, occupying the baroque fresco fragments of the sala terrera of Dubniczay Palace. The installation's mobility and spatial adaptability have been adapted to the palace's specificities. The host institution, in turn, was invited to add a chair from their own collection to our exhibition, making it both local and communal. As an exhibition for the Madok- programme of Ethnography Museum , our aim was to create a travelling, modifiable, movable exhibition with the architects, which each host institution and its community could rewrite through a collaborative and imaginative process.

The contemporary design objects and the objects from the collection that are displayed together in the exhibition are related. Each chair is a character in its own right, a bearer of a leitmotif. Most importantly, they are in dialogue: they ask questions, provide answers, they point out, and replicate. The selection of the objects in the museum ranges from prestige furniture of the peasant households to the furniture used out of necessity. But they differ not only in function, but also in age, use of material, and manufacturing technology. But the plastic garden chair and the wooden armchair from 1714, one of the oldest objects in the collection, fit well next to each other, just as a horse skull or a carefully crafted desk chair carved with artistic ambition. At the exhibition in Veszprém, the selection is complemented by an artwork from the Vass Collection: an adaptation of Rietveld's chair by Tibor Csiky, a self-taught neo-avant-garde sculptor, which weaves together and interweaves the ideas of the exhibition.

The adaptation is actually a redrawing. The freehand drawings became plans, then they were turned into handmade chairs in the carpenter’s workshop. The free hand that gets tired after a long day’s work, that draws asymmetrical line patterns, makes mistakes, and shows inaccuracies. The practice of creating homemade objects can be regarded as the fundamental logic of peasant households. The building and the object are made valuable by their maker, their user and their everyday usage. Even though maker remain unknown to science and art. The process of making these objects is not based on strictly following plans or on elaborating every detail, but on manual skills, craftsmanship, and creativity given or guided by necessity or a great idea. 

Concept, design and implementation: Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop/ AU Workshop (Lukács Szederkényi and Dénes Emil Ghyczy)

Curator: Anna Zsoldos and Tamás Molnár ( Museum of Ethnography), Bernadett Grászli ( The House of Arts Veszprém)

Project Manager: Zsófia Frazon

Graphics: Tamás Boldizsár Hoffmann