Dominika Trapp at Trafó Gallery

Artist: Dominika Trapp

Exhibition title: Don’t lay him on me…

Venue: Trafó Gallery, Budapest, Hungary

Date: January 18 – March 1, 2020

Photography: Dávid Biró / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Trafó Gallery, Budapest

In her solo exhibition, Dominika Trapp focuses on and stretches the boundaries defined by folk culture. Looking behind the ideals conveyed by folk music and folk dance, as well as behind the discursive, symbolic and somatically engrained elements of rural culture, the exhibition attempts to reread these communal norms from a present perspective. The installation also explores the chains of meanings folk culture can be embedded in, the extent that its boundaries can be widened to, and how can it be inhabited by certain individuals and communities. The exhibition highlights the influences and implications of radical detours of folk traditions, as well as examples of appropriations of and consensually accepted norms on different bodies (the body of a female folk dancer, the body of a peasant woman, the body perceived as a fetish object, the body of the dead), and thus articulates a multi-layered critique that turns towards the archaic in order to find a way out of the crisis of the present.

The exhibition can also be regarded as a faction of the hungarofuturist project, a statement event of hungarofeminism. The hungarofuturist project reverts to the past in order to detour the future, it seeks

the local in the universal and the shared experience that can withstand divisions. This approach is associated with a feminist point of view that criticizes the structure of the public domain, hegemonic discourses, and the knowledges concerning the body. Hungarofeminism therefore maps, distracts, expands the contact points of the somatic and the social, giving space to time travel either on the plane of traumas or in mythical times.

Supported by: National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Káli Kövek, Trapéz Gallery

Dominika Trapp, Don’t lay him on me…, 2020, exhibition view, Trafó Gallery, Budapest

Exhibition view, in the foreground Dominika Trapp: BORN lies DIED, 2020. Watercolour pencil, carton, 75x100cm. (Photo: Dávid Biró)

Exhibition view, in the foreground Dominika Trapp in collaboration with Richárd Kránicz: The Body Perceived as a Fetish Object, 2020. Installation. (Photo: Dávid Biró)

Dominika Trapp, Don’t lay him on me…, 2020, exhibition view, Trafó Gallery, Budapest

Dominika Trapp in collaboration with AU Workshop:The Body of the Peasant Women, 2020 (Sound installation) Photo: Dávid Biró

Dominika Trapp in collaboration with Richárd Kránicz: The Body Perceived as a Fetish Object, 2020. Detail of the installation. (Photo: Dávid Biró)

Dominika Trapp: The Body Perceived as a Fetish Object,2020. Mould made paper, watercolour pencil. (Photo: Dávid Biró)

Dominika Trapp in collaboration with Richárd Kránicz: The Body Perceived as a Fetish Object, 2020. Detail of the installation. (Photo: Dávid Biró)

Dominika Trapp: The Body Perceived as a Fetish Object,2020. Mould made paper, oil pastel. (Photo: Dávid Biró)

Dominika Trapp, Don’t lay him on me…, 2020, exhibition view, Trafó Gallery, Budapest

Dominika Trapp in collaboration withNoémi Varga: The Body of the Female Folk Dancer, 2020. Video (06’40”). (Photo: Dávid Biró)

Dominika Trapp in collaboration withNoémi Varga: The Body of the Female Folk Dancer, 2020. Video still

Dominika Trapp in collaboration with AU Workshop:The Body of the Peasant Women, 2020. Sound installation. (Photo: Dávid Biró)

Dominika Trapp:The Body of the Peasant Women, 2020. Mould made paper, watercolour pencil. (Photo: Dávid Biró)

Dominika Trapp in collaboration with AU Workshop:The Body of the Peasant Women, 2020. Sound installation – detail. (Photo: Dávid Biró)