Hollow - Archive III (Baby)

Curator of the exhibition: Natálie Drtinová

The multimedia installation Archive III (Baby) is the latest chapter of The Archive, an evolving metaproject centered around the fictional Hollow universes and their interconnectedness.

The exhibition is guided by a character called Baby, a virtual offspring who comments on it from its own perspective. In addition to this unique look at Hollow's realizations, the exhibition speculates on what the artwork would say about its creators if it could speak.

Most of the objects on display belong to an imaginary place called Aura, which Hollow created during their research into collective world-building and shared imagination. The immersive theatre piece Aura premiered at the Trafó House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest in 2023, where some of these objects were used as props. The piece focused primarily on the question “How does a group become something greater than just the union of its members?” While Aura envisioned this emerging entity as an imaginary friend who could guide artists in their creative process, Baby is more like a mirror through which they can look at themselves from the perspective of what they have given birth to.

The exhibition connects a series of recent works in which the three artists reflect on their micro-community and explore the process of making art as a world-making. Meanwhile, a video introducing Baby was created especially for the occasion as a preview of a larger work in progress, in which Hollow explores the functioning of art collectives as a form of care and an alternative to the nuclear family model.

Organic

Hollow embodies the shared visions of dancer/choreographer Viktor Szeri, game designer/media artist Tamás Páll, and curator/writer Gyula Muskovics, who have been collaborating since 2018. In their immersive prototype worlds, which often combine performance art, experimental theater, and contemporary dance with cutting-edge technologies, game design, and role-playing, they question dominant systems of consensual reality and propose new ways of living together. Along their journey, they have so far explored themes and contexts such as queer cruising, hyperspace, chiliastic cults, the radicalization of gaming subculture, eco-anxiety, nature as a black box, walking as a psychoactive substance, and shared imagination.

They have performed and exhibited at various venues, as well as in theaters, galleries and festivals including Art Quarter Budapest (Budapest, HU), Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (Budapest, HU), Dome umenia (Brno, CZ), MeetFactory (Prague, CZ), Y Event Series (Prague, CZ), Under500 Festival (Budapest, HU), Montag Modus (Berlin, DE), Art Cologne (Cologne, DE), Kunstverein Eisenstadt (Eisenstadt, AT), radialsystem (Berlin, DE) and Donaufestival (Krems, AT).

Hollow has received numerous residencies and grants, such as the Performing Arts residency program of the International Visegrad Fund (MeetFactory, Prague in 2018/19; Krytyka Polityczna, Warsaw in 2022), the Creative Europe i-Portunus mobility program (X10 Theatre, Prague in 2019 and Open Space, Tbilisi in 2022), the Goethe-Institut International Co-Production Fund (with Sín Arts and aqb, Budapest and Montag Modus, Berlin in 2020/21), the Live Studio at Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen in 2023, and the MODINA residency at Kine Siska in 2025.

The exhibitions of this gallery were supported by the Art Support Fund from public sources.

The Art Support Fund is the main partner of the project.

The project was further supported by the City of Košice.