An overview of the history of Montag Modus and its main initiatives
The Montag Modus series consists of five co-occurring elements: the artists and their works, the presence of the audience, the usage of the various spaces and the dialogue between the artworks. It is an interdisciplinary series centering around performance and installation art, time-based media and choreography in an expanded field. Many artists and curators have contributed to the series and have helped shape Montag Modus to become what it is today. As the artistic director of the series, I would like to offer my account of its development.
If art, in its broadest sense, offers an opportunity for us to look at ourselves and reflect on our time, then live art situates us in the act of observing ourselves. The live situation inherently adds the condition of mutual awareness between people. Given that live art uses the material of others’ bodies, its primary substance is relations, and with that, the consciousness of such relationality. The act of performing and observing, as well as the relationships between bodies in space, amplifies the tension hidden in the interaction between active and passive presence. Live art works in the moment, in cooperation with the audience, and can assume entirely new forms. This phenomenon is an essential element of the Montag Modus interdisciplinary event series.
Montag Modus started as a pilot program at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (CHB) in 2015. Art historian and curator Kata Krasznahorkai, who worked at the institute at the time, invited me to create a program with her for the house. Originally, it was launched as a six-event project with a one-week residency accompanying each event, with the aim of creating a platform for Berlin-based and Hungarian artists who work with live art.
From the outset, Montag Modus was a trial-and-error process. Its name, which translates to ‘Monday mode’, sprung out of the idea that, on the first Monday of the month, the institute would transform into a different state. It would enter an exceptional sphere, quite unlike its “normal” working structure. The selected artists were invited to occupy the five-story building of the CHB and were encouraged to experiment with different formats of presentation. The use of the building's unusual spaces was an exciting challenge for everyone involved in the evening. Aside from the dedicated theatre and gallery spaces, works were presented and installed in the basement, the courtyard, the seminar rooms, the library, the industrial kitchen, the communal spaces and even in the fifth-floor guest apartments.
With the involvement of the then-director Gábor Kopek and the curatorial team, the CHB developed a programming structure, built upon five so-called “modes” (scenic-science-screen-sound-space), that focused on creative processes. As a component of the ‘scenic mode’, the Montag Modus events became an essential part of the institute, following the CHB’s three-year thematic model. In 2016, the theme was ‘chaos/entropy’, which shifted to ‘reform and reorder’ in 2017, which in turn prepared audiences for the final year's theme in 2018, ‘order and utopia’. These themes acted as a conceptual guideline for the artists, for us curators and our collaborators. Inspired by the overarching themes, each event was based on discussions and in-depth consideration of the topics and the building’s spatial qualities.
During these years, Montag Modus became a space for encounters that invited both newcomers and established artists to try out ideas and present their work. When conceptualizing the program, we paid particular attention towards inviting artists from Budapest and Berlin who shared similar aesthetics and could inspire one another. This didn’t mean that they would have to work together, but the event offered an opportunity for them to meet. Although the evening presented individual works, the program was intended to be experienced as a single event. Our aim was to find a structure in which each work is connected with the others, but could also still stand on its own.
The simultaneous engagement of various spaces allows the works to enter into a temporary dialogue in an exhibition-like situation. In my understanding, Montag Modus continuously investigates different methodologies of how to exhibit live art and tests the formats of these events. Within this ongoing research, I continue to question which forms of knowledge arise through the combination of live works.
Collaboration is the base of Montag Modus. Its philosophy is to interrupt the routines of thought and action. After having led the series for three years, I felt that the structure of the series demanded new perspectives and a fresh curatorial approach. I invited choreographer Jasna Layes Vinovrški, along with Budapest-based art historian and former CHB program director Dániel Kovács, to join the curatorial team for the one-year long project Klimata. Together, we founded the MMpraxis curatorial platform, which took over the directorial role of Montag Modus. We continued our collaboration with the CHB and its director Márta Nagy, with Micaela Kühn Jara also joining the team as production manager.
In this frame, Montag Modus Klimata became MMpraxis curatorial platform's first project. The five-event interdisciplinary project was a collective curatorial project investigating the notion of ‘climate’. With the collaboration between artists, curators and institutions at its core, we explored in which way these relations could be challenged on an artistic, curatorial and productional level. Spurred on by the current ecological situation which clearly requires us to reconfigure our perspective, we sought new modes of curating and engaging with live art.
After Klimata, I will continue to organize Montag Modus under the framework of the MMpraxis curatorial platform.
In order to challenge the notion of interdisciplinarity, I will invite curators and artists, who come from different fields, to devise the program with me. Within these collaborations, I look forward to discussing methodologies that are used in theatres, art institutions, academia and artistic practices, and to try out new approaches of conceptualization.
Under the overarching title of “Ecology of Attention”, our thematic focus in 2020 lies on attention in the age of the digital and on strategies for resisting the attention economy. With five editions, we will organize events in Berlin and Prague with Berlin-based and Czech artists. Our aim is to explore the phenomenon of attention not only as an economy, oriented towards financial profit, but also as an ecosystem which we must take care of if we wish to develop forms of life that are collectively sustainable and individually desirable.