HOLLOW

Archive III (Baby)

The multimedia installation Archive III (Baby) is the latest chapter of The Archive, an evolving meta-project that revolves around Hollow’s fictional universes and their worlds’ interconnectedness. At the center of the exhibition is a character called Baby, a virtual offspring, that invites the audience on a guided tour and talks about the exhibited objects from their personal point of view. In addition to offering a unique insight into Hollow’s functioning, the show speculates about what would an artwork say about its creators if it could speak.

Most of the objects on display belong to an imaginary place called Aura, that Hollow has created over their research on collective worldbuilding and shared imagination. An immersive theater piece, Aura premiered at the Trafó House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest in 2023, where some of these objects were used as props, and among its main questions was “What makes a group more than the sum of its members?” While Aura envisioned this emergent entity as an imaginary friend that could show guidance to the artists in the creative process, Baby is more akin to a mirror through which they can look at themselves from the perspective of what they have given birth to.

The exhibition merges a series of recent works in which the three artists reflect on their micro-community and explore the process of art-making as world-making. Meanwhile, the video introducing Baby is created specifically for this occasion as a demo of an upcoming, larger-scale piece in which Hollow explores the functioning of art collectives as a form of care-work and an alternative to the nuclear family model.

Bio

Hollow embodies the shared hallucinations of dancer/choreographer Viktor Szeri, game designer/media artist Tamás Páll, and curator/writer Gyula Muskovics who have been working collectively since 2018. In their immersive world prototypes, often merging performance art, experimental theater, and contemporary dance with cutting-edge technologies, game design and role-play, they question the dominant systems of consensual reality and propose new ways of coexistence. Along their journey, they have ventured into topics and contexts such as queer cruising, the hyperspace, millennial cults, the radicalization of the gamer subculture, eco-anxiety, nature as a black box, walking as a psychoactive substance, and shared imagination.

They have performed and exhibited in off-sites as well as theaters, galleries, and festivals including art quarter budapest (Budapest, HU); Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (Budapest, HU), House of Arts (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 been awarded 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 i-Portunus mobility program of Creative Europe (Divadlo X10, Prague in 2019 and Open Space, Tbilisi in 2022), the International Co-production Fund of the Goethe Institute (with Sín Arts and aqb, Budapest and Montag Modus, Berlin in 2020/21), the Live Studio at Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen in 2023, and MODINA Residencies at Kino Siska in 2025. 

The program of the gallery is supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.

The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project. 

The project is also financially supported by City Košice.

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