The act of leaving one`s given place and occupying another is both emotionally and spiritually intense. Whether it is the relocation of people or the displacement of objects, the negative or positive charge of this movement is determined by cultural, historical, temporal and spatial factors. Is this a common life experience or a poetically charged site with immeasurable potential?

The artworks featured in this exhibition represent the unpredictable personal and cultural psychological effects, as well as the societal impacts, of relocation and displacement. Confrontations with the new, which affect the individual ego or a given social group, are often unexpected and astonishingly powerful. The tensions and frictions created by motion activate powerful energies and voltages, and corresponding actions of resistance. Their effect-mechanisms can include culture shock, identity crisis and other complex, refined and imponderable elements. These are mostly invisible, even when the acts themselves are radical.

What happens after acts of relocation and displacement? How do these acts influence our personal lives, our mental states, or our cultural perceptions? These questions are relevant in the context of “local-versus-global” intellectual discourse, but even more so in our everyday lives, in which we constantly seek greater mobility. Individuals and groups are relocating themselves geographically, objects are displaced locally, data and information transferred digitally, and point of view refocused intellectually. How do these acts rearrange a situation, a narrative or an ethos? What happens to these material and immaterial things within their new contexts? How does it shift our illusions about the permanence of things?

The artworks and projects featured in this exhibition represent some surprising attitudes about relocation and displacement, and express instinctive strategies of resistance to their effects. The artists come from different corners of the world and use varied artistic approaches to examine the same experience. All provocatively offer answers to the questions that inspired this show: What can be the gains of the physical and intellectual relocation? And, more importantly, can we displace our focus without losses?

Participating Artists: Big Hope (Miklós Erhardt and Dominic Hislop), Ian Burns, Sonja Feldmeier, Andrea Geyer, Wang Jianwei, Szabolcs Kisspál, Moshekwa Langa, Little Warsaw (Bálint Havas and András Gálik), Myrna Maakaron, Katarina Sevic