EXHIBITION EXTENDED UNTIL 14 NOVEMBER 2025!

In 2025, at the MAGMA Contemporary Art Exhibition Space art research laboratory, we launched the processing of the archive of the AnnART Performance Festival, which we plan to make publicly accessible in the form of a digital archive by the end of the year.

This archiving project also shapes MAGMA’s exhibition programme for this year. Within this framework, we aim to focus in particular on the generation that, in the 1990s, contributed to the organization of the AnnART Performance Festival as volunteers, and later continued this art-organizing activity along their own professional paths. The exhibition will also examine selected artistic careers in which one can recognize the courage and openness to different genres that they experienced during their student years in Sfântu Gheorghe and as volunteers of the AnnART Performance Festival.

Volunteer New Wave is an exhibition expanding in chapters, presenting the first five generations of the Art High School in Sfântu Gheorghe. The project begins with a framework exhibition, the opening of which has been scheduled to this year’s Saint George Days. This exhibition primarily features a selection of individual performances by Art High School students (Art High School – Performance Days; Living Art Meeting – Saint George Days; Silent Circle). The exhibition seeks to embed these materials within a broader context, which also serves as a kind of historical point of departure for subsequent expansions. Within the exhibition, visitors can browse “nekedbohóc!” – the former student magazine of the Art High School –, read a brief historical overview of the Art High School, and view photographs of group happenings performed in the schoolyard and during excursions, as well as several graduation class boards from the first generation. The exhibition also offers insight into the city’s cultural institutional background, presenting the Live Theque performance documentation programme organized by the ETNA Foundation, along with selections from the activities of the Tower Gallery, the New Gallery (Glass Barn), and the municipal Art Gallery. The exhibition is based on documents preserved in the legacy of the ETNA Foundation, as well as on conversations with former teachers of the Art High School – Gusztáv Ütő and Katalin Hervai – and with the artists involved. A part of the exhibited material has been included through their collaboration and consists of objects and documents connected to their years at the Art High School: works from the period, photographs, video recordings, selections of music from the 1990s, written recollections, memory notebooks, etc.

The exhibition architecture is being developed in collaboration with Csongor Gáspár, a former student of the Art High School in Sfântu Gheorghe. He has developed a level of production capacity in the field of 3D printing that makes it possible to work at an architectural scale. Our concept envisions this technology as a way to construct spatially within the exhibition space in layered formations, detached from the wall. The first layer of the exhibition is already offset from the wall, allowing additional historical background elements to be placed behind it. Moving inward, the space will be modularly expandable, shaped by dialogues that highlight elements from the later biographies and artistic or art-organizing practices of former students which, from a present-day perspective, reconnect to their student years in Sfântu Gheorghe. In this way, a further, inner exhibition emerges within the overall display.

The expansion is based on the premise that volunteering or participating in the AnnART Performance Festival had a significant impact on the creative and organizational work of several generations. This experience offers important insights for different segments of the city, especially for today’s generations of students. The exhibition also seeks to emphasize that the MAGMA Contemporary Art Exhibition Space exhibition space itself is connected to a new generational wave, without whose critical mass it probably could not even exist.

Szilárd Miklós