Night of Contemporary Galleries

Organized by Café Budapest with the participation of over twenty-four art galleries, the Night of Contemporary Galleries turns the white cube into an agora, a marketplace of the intellect that encourages the exchange of ideas and impulses, a place that is dominated not by the objects that “speak for themselves”, but by the moods, sentiments and ideas they prompt.

Our program includes our current exhibition, András Szirtes’s Film Diary 1979–2004, featuring a public lecture by Szirtes at 8 pm, followed by a performance at 9 pm of readings and song by the writer, poet, playwright and painter János Háy, and rock singer and guitarist Zoltán Beck.

On Szirtes’s lecture:
On the 100th anniversary of the birth of the film (1995), András Szirtes decided to embark on a traveling filmmaker’s journey. He acquired a century-old hand-cranked camera and a projector and built a portable film laboratory. He toured the filming locations of the Lumière brothers and shot his own footage at the same locations. He developed them the same day and showed them to the inhabitants of small French villages in the evening. If he could find musicians in the area, they would accompany the performance, if not, his gramophone would provide the background music, while he would add his own commentary to the hand-cranked projection like a fairground barker. This evening, in the context of the exhibition, Szirtes will re-screen these films for a live audience.

The program is in Hungarian.