Hajnal Németh, Freedom Trap

Freedom Trap (2023–) is an innovative performance in an “counter-concert” format that employs musical, rhythmic, and vocal techniques, and brings together performers from a range of diverse professional fields to interpret two distinct yet interrelated texts. The first part reimagines Tibor Hajas’s Freedom Industry Broadcast, Channel IV (1973). Serving as a kind of counterposition, this is followed by excerpts from archival secret-agent and police reports documenting Hajas’s 1973 performance in Balatonboglár and describing the context of the Chapel Studio. 

While the validity of Hajas’s text becomes newly manifest over the course of the present performance, the compilation of reports gradually disintegrates—literally falling apart. Through this example taken from the past and transposed into the present, the performance explores the relativity and the illusion of freedom within an authoritarian system. 

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Tibor Hajas (1946–80) was an iconic figure of the Hungarian underground art scene of the 1970s, known for his writings, conceptual works, films, and performances. 

György Galántai’s Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár functioned between 1970 and 1973 as a model of self-organized, progressive artistic activity in Hungary, operating independently of official cultural policy. In 1989, Galántai was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. 

The Freedom Trap project was originally initiated at the commission of curators Gabriella Schuller and László Százados. It premiered in Balatonboglár in 2023, was presented in Berlin in 2024, and is now shown in Budapest in a newly adapted version of approximately thirty minutes. 

Hajnal Németh works at the intersection of visual art and music. Her interdisciplinary practice includes performances, moving-image formats, and site-specific audiovisual installations. Her works draw on quotations from various sources as well as on her own writings. Her innovative approach to time, rhythm, and intonation, along with her playful questioning of structures of meaning, often manifests in minimalist interventions into existing materials. In her collaborations with composers and performers, she experiments with the arbitrary construction and deconstruction of contexts. 

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Hajnal Németh’s performance Freedom Trap is part of the joint program series of the Blinken OSA Archivum and the Goethe-Institut Budapest, also titled Freedom Trap. The series takes its name from Németh’s performance of the same title.