[artinfo] !Upwardly Mobile comes to Budapest, Ludwig Museum on 1 December

[anna balint]

!Upwardly Mobile will use a public space of 
the Ludwig Museum for Modern Art in Budapest on 
December 1 for a special project. Approximately 
25 international artists were invited to send 
a work that fits into a transparent plastic bag. 
These bags will be hung in the wardrobe of the 
museum. In participating, the artists are given a 
chance to upgrade their curriculum vitae and move 
up in the world of established arts... 

What remains of an exhibition nowadays, 
the documentation, is often more important 
than the exhibition itself ever was. 
How many artists' work are we familiar with only 
through the traces it has left behind in catalogues, 
reviews or on the web? Is not the exhibition more and 
more a device geared towards generating publicity 
rather than an enterprise undertaken for its own 
sake? !Upwardly Mobile takes this idea to the 
extreme by reducing the exhibition to this nucear 
task. What matters, is that the art works have factually 
been inside the walls of the museum for a certain period, 
however short that may be. The wardrobe of the museum 
has been chosen for this purpose, as it can be 
considered a semi-public space between the institutional 
and the non-institutional, still open for interventions 
like these. !Upwardly Mobile behaves like a clever 
parasite of the museum organism, using its host for 
transportation to other suitable hosts and simultaneously 
assuring its survival by feeding on the life saps of the 
museum, such as its good name and visitors. As with 
other harmless parasites, !Upwardly Mobile will by 
itself not cause any vital damage to the host, merely 
a slight sense of irritation. 

You are welcome on Sunday between 13 and 16 hours to 
study the life cycle of the parasite and the relation 
between the host and its unsolicited guest.

Participants: Sebastian Behmann, Norman Beierle, 
Jacquie GZ, Tamuna Chabashwili, Donald Clark, 
Alasdair Currie, Iemke van Dijk, Valentina Ferrarese, 
Amanda McGregor, Koen Hauser, Joerg Huber, IRWIN, 
Jordan & Hewitt, Hester Keijser, Andrea Morucchio, 
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Esther Polak, Erwin Posarnig, 
Samantha Rees, Shinique Smith, Mirjana Stojadinovic, 
Sasha White, Alfonso Juan Zapato, Mattias Zuccheti

You can also visit the website 
http://digilander.iol.it/upwardlymobile for more 
images of the project as it visited the Frankfurt 
Museum for Modern Art and for more information on 
the artists.

The project was organised by Beierle, Ferrarese and Keijser