Emese Benczúr's soloshow curated by Marcella Koczkás at AM Projects in Budapest.
Emese Benczúr: THE CALL OF DUTY
Curated by Marcella Koczkás
11 April – 21 June, 2025
AM Projects, Budapest
After a year-long exhibition programme dedicated to showcasing young, emerging women artists, am projects now presents THE CALL OF DUTY, a solo exhibition by Emese Benczúr. Benczúr has been one of the leading figures in the Hungarian conceptual art scene since the 1990s and has been collaborating with Molnár Ani Gallery since 2010. Her practice is characterised by a strong focus on text and short slogans, which interact uniquely with her distinctive techniques and material choices, revealing the complexity of her work.
At the core of THE CALL OF DUTY is an exploration of invisible domestic labour and the notion of 'duty'—a theme that also refers to Benczúr’s diploma piece in 1995, Doing My Duty, in which she spent an entire semester with repetitively embroidering the titular phrase onto curtain tape. While her early works often featured first-person statements functioning as titles and repeated in a mantra-like fashion, her more recent practice has evolved into a meditative process, revisiting and reinterpreting texts, concepts, and the performative acts embedded in their creation.
In this exhibition, her signature use of repeated text serves as a metaphor for the endless cycle of housework. Material selection is always a deliberate process for Benczúr—sometimes the text comes first, at other times the material itself inspires the work, while the exhibition space also influences the final outcome. The materials featured—colourful, shimmering sponges, broom heads, patterned shopping bags, and flour sacks—are all objects associated with domestic labour, repurposed as artworks. Across these surfaces, imperatives, self-reflective texts, and phrases incorporating the word duty appear, reframing the invisibility of women’s labour while making a visually and conceptually powerful statement.
Benczúr’s works frequently respond to current social and political events. The glittering letters forming her texts act as reflections on reality, striving to construct a more optimistic and hopeful narrative.
THE CALL OF DUTY examines the relationship between creation and obligation, the parallels between artistic and domestic labour, and the persistent invisibility of women's work—employing a subtle yet striking irony and a compelling aesthetic approach.
Emese Benczúr (b. 1969, Budapest) graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 1996. She was awarded the Derkovits Gyula Art Scholarship in 2003 and received the Munkácsy Prize in 2006. She regularly participates in solo and group exhibitions in Hungary and abroad. Her works have been showcased at prestigious international art events such as Manifesta, the Venice Biennale, and the Liverpool Biennial, and are included in major private and public collections, including MUSAC in Spain, the Ludwig Museum, and the Hungarian National Gallery.
