Vienna is calling! The Eurovision Song Contest 2026 Grand Final is happening tonight in Vienna 🇦🇹 🇪🇺 🏳️🌈
If you look closely at tonight’s stage design, it shares the exact same futuristic energy as our current exhibition, ’like glass beads to quartz +’. Specifically, Tamás Ábel’s brand-new piece - created exclusively for our exhibition - manipulates and reflects light beams in the same mesmerizing way that’s about to light up the Eurovision stage. 🪩🌈🔦
Experiencing both in person is the ultimate weekend plan. It might not be too late to sprint to Vienna for the finals, but if you want to skip the crowds, Ábel’s work is on show in our gallery until the end of June. ✨
@mfa_austria@cosmomachtmusik@eurovision@reginarusz
#teambmeia
#eurovision
#unitedbymusic
📢✨ Meet the artist: Gábor Bódy
Gábor Bódy established an autonomous aesthetic system at the intersection of experimental film language, semiotics, and video art. His oeuvre represents a kind of comprehensive cinematic vision, in which historical drama, cosmic interconnections, and visual deconstruction are intertwined - narrative structures are frequently supplanted by pictorial rhythm and a mathematically precise mode of composition. Bódy’s works seek answers to fundamental questions of timekeeping and human perception, uniting classical European erudition with forward-looking technological visions.
✨ Join us for the opening of "like glass beads to quartz +" on May 13th at 6:00 PM and discover artwork by Gábor Bódy among many others!
📢✨ Meet the artist: Hopp-Halász Károly
Károly Hopp-Halász established an autonomous aesthetic system at the intersection of geometric abstraction, performance art, and the visual language of Pop Art. His oeuvre is a unique synthesis of provincial existence and international avant-garde aspirations, where the reduction of form, the vulnerability of the human body, and the deconstruction of everyday objects are intertwined - rigid structures are frequently supplanted by organic gestures and a provocative sense of irony. Hopp-Halász’s works seek answers to the fundamental relationship between the individual and their environment. Moreover, the scholarly interpretation of his work through the lens of queer art has only recently gained legitimacy, unearthing a layer of meaning that had long remained marginalized.
✨ Join us for the opening of "like glass beads to quartz +" on May 13th at 6:00 PM and discover artworks by Károly Hopp-Halász among many others!
📢✨ Meet the artist: El Kazovszkij
El Kazovszkij’s oeuvre is one of the most coherent projects in contemporary art, establishing a hermetic visual universe at the intersection of Transavantgarde and Postmodernism. The oeuvre constitutes a form of 'personal mythology', in which the drama of human vulnerability, desire, and existential loneliness unfolds against the backdrop of desert landscapes and theatrical sets. Recurring characters serve not just as visual symbols, but as philosophical representations of the boundaries between body and soul. Kazovszkij’s paintings and installations address the age-old questions of identity and freedom, imbued with the inevitability of Greek tragedies and the depth of contemporary psychology.
✨ Join us for the opening of "like glass beads to quartz +" on May 13th at 6:00 PM and discover artworks by El Kazovszkij among many others!
📢✨ Meet the artist: Zoltán Fehér @zorrodebianco74
Zoltán Fehér is a cornerstone of domestic comic culture, navigating the intersection of fine art and graphic narrative. His career, stretching from 1990s alternative spaces to his current position as head of the Hungarian Comics Academy, is as versatile as it is influential. A pivotal presence in El Kazovszkij’s seminal Dzahn Panopticon performances, Fehér remains an iconic figure in the contemporary art canon.
✨ Join us for the opening of "like glass beads to quartz +" on May 13th at 6:00 PM and discover artworks by Zoltán Fehér among many others!
📢🎤 Meet the speaker: Jojó Majercsik @avantgandi
We are thrilled to introduce our opening ceremony speaker, a film theorist and cultural manager who earned her degree in France before returning to Hungary to work on numerous film, theater, and fine arts projects. Since joining Budapest Pride in 2015, she has been a key figure in organizing the festival, and since 2023, she has been sharing her voice as the editor and host of the podcast Vedd vissza a hangod! (Reclaim Your Voice!). Jojó is also the managing editor of the 2025 anthology Anyaföld íze a számban (The Taste of Motherland in My Mouth), and we couldn’t be more excited to have her with us!
✨🎤 Join us on May 13th at 6:00 PM to open the exhibition with an introductory speech by Jojó Majercsik.
📢 💿 Meet the DJs: KALAMANKA
For the opening, we’re bringing the pulse of the Budapest underground to the gallery floor. Meet KALAMANKA, the duo of Kata Balizs @balizskataanna and Blanka Bencze @blankabencze
After a decade of shaping the scene, curating lineups, and living on the dancefloor, these two best friends are finally stepping into the booth together to reclaim the narrative through a queer lens. Moving fluidly through the borderlands of house, disco, and minimal, their sound is a raw translation of years of deep listening. Expect sets that balance surgical precision with emotional spontaneity crafted to create tension, release, and pure connection.
✨💿Join us on May 13th at 6:00 PM to experience the intersection of KALAMANKA’s sonic landscape.
📢✨ Meet the artist: Ju Aichinger @nur__ju
Ju Aichinger's artistic practice encompasses installation, costume design, painting, and ceramics. Moving between the familiar and the abstract, their work draws on queer subcultures, exploring and re-contextualising their material and immaterial traces.
✨ Join us for the opening of "like glass beads to quartz +" on May 13th at 6:00 PM and discover artworks by Ju Aichinger among many others!
📢✨ Meet the artist: Ildikó Várnagy
Since the 1960s, Ildikó Várnagy has been one of the most influential and constantly evolving figures in Hungarian sculpture. Her art-historical significance lies in her unique fusion of traditional sculpting techniques with postmodern materials, with which she repeatedly transcends the boundaries of the genre. She deconstructs sculptural conventions in her creative practice, representing a non-conformist aesthetic through a sensitive examination of social gender roles. In the work presented at the Austrian Cultural Forum, she explores existential and ontological themes through her series of Pilinszky reliefs.
✨ Join us for the opening of "like glass beads to quartz +" on May 13th at 6:00 PM and discover artworks by Ildikó Várnagy among many others!
📢✨ Meet the artist: Laura Czuczor @laura_czuczor
Laura Czuczor’s artistic practice explores transitional states and the fluid nature of identity instead of fixed forms. Her ceramic objects transmute the experiences of the body and vulnerability into material, manifesting non-static states, continuous transformation, and resistance to normative frameworks. In recognition of this reflexive approach - specifically for her works exhibited at the Austrian Cultural Forum Budapest - she was recently awarded the Derkovits Scholarship.
✨ Join us for the opening of "like glass beads to quartz +" on May 13th at 6:00 PM and discover artworks by Laura Czuczor among many others!
