Curator-in-residence

Residency period

1 February – 7 February 2017

About

Márton Orosz (b. 1979, Hungary) is Curator of the Collection of Photography and Media Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Acting Director of the Vasarely Museum both in in Budapest, Hungary. He has recently curated Hungarian Artists and the Computer (2016), Time Landscape. Alan Sonfist and the Birth of Land Art (2014), and Film Experiments Brought to Light (2014).

He earned his PhD in Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He has been Terra Fellow at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., United States, and György Kepes Fellow for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research at MIT, Cambridge, United States. His publications range across the history of photography, film, and collecting. His essay on Gyorgy Kepes’ Polaroid experiments appeared in AR – Artistic Research (Walther König, 2013). His study on the 1930s European abstract animated film industry was published in Regarding the Popular. Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture (De Gruyter, 2011).

Focus

While in residence Márton Orosz will further his research on György Kepes, the Hungarian-born artist, designer, educator and theorist who founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967 as a “brainstorming laboratory” for artists and scientists to bridge the gap between art and science and address the social responsibility of design. He will explore the trans-regional connections of Kepes’ theories in Southeast Asia to shed light on the values shared by painters, designers, and architects who came into contact with Kepes and maintained a similar interest in the ecological consciousness and art’s capacity to trigger social transformations. Orosz plans to interview Choy Weng Yang, a seminal figure in the Singaporean art scene who visited Kepes in 1973, and to conduct archival research at the National Library and at the National Gallery Singapore.