Borbála Soós CV Events Curating
Borbála Soós
bori (at) borbalasoos.co.uk Curating Events CV
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Borbála Soós (1984, Budapest) is a UK-based curator and an active advocate, participant and organiser of artistic and ecological research. Borbála’s practice responds to, disrupts and enriches environmental thinking and related social and political urgencies. She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, London (2012). And MA in Art History & Film Studies from Eötvos Loránd University, Budapest (2009). Between 2012 and 2019 she was director/curator of Tenderpixel, a contemporary art gallery in central London. She curated projects in collaboration with the OFF-Biennale, Budapest; Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest; ICA, London; Camden Arts Centre, London; tranzit, Bratislava; Rupert, Vilnius; and Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid among others. She has been visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths College, the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins. She is leading a Peer Forum in collaboration with Artquest at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, and is a Research Associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry.

Hangover, Plant, Mushrooms, Animal, Object Oriented Ontologies, Social Choreography, Forest, System Dynamics, Rewilding, Commons, Language & Politics, Participation, Magic & Politics

Ecologies of the Ghost Landscape. The Word for World is Forest. Maria Thereza Alves, Petra Feriancová, Oto Hudec, Gerard Ortín, Hanna Rullmann & Faiza Ahmad Khan, Petr Štembera, 11 June – 1 August 2020, tranzit, Bratislava, Slovakia

The underlying condition in which this exhibition and related events and online activities came about is a global emergency, one which is emerging out of an unfolding ecological crisis and can be attributed to the violent process of rampant deforestation, which constitutes a continuation of imperial methods of territorial control. This massive reshaping of the land, together with the shifting baselines regarding what kind of green deserts we are willing to accept as forests, might be seen as a symptom of our Anthropocene epoch. The show conjures up the ghosts of lost or near-extinct species, forests and sensations.

Residency and performative online lecture, How to Become a Forest?, March – May 2020, Agosto Foundation, Prague, Czech Republic

As an outcome of her residency March - May 2020 at Agosto Foundation, Prague, curator Borbála Soós invites you on a journey. In the familiar style of virtual guided tours in exhibition halls, she will take you through a series of existing and imagined spaces filled with strange details and luscious vegetation. She will guide you through a series of passageways, exploring the complex and entangled relationship between places, species and history with the help of audio pieces, videos and other artworks. Along the way Borbála will talk about issues of narrativisation and of how we perceive nature, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. She will problematise colonial legacies, the financialization of nature, rewilding and humans as saviours of nature.

How to Talk to Birds? – lecture performance – WE ARE WOODS: About Plant Intelligence and Interspecies Communication, 26 – 28 July 2019, Czech Republic

The lecture performance was part of the events at the forest gathering with WOODS, Community for Cultivation, Theory and Art, near the village of Písečná, Ústí nad Orlicí, in the foothills of the Orlické Mountains, Czech Republic. Titled WE ARE WOODS: About Plant Intelligence and Interspecies Communication, artists, theorists, curators, sociologists, plant and star experts met, discussed, cooked, and shared time in a forest removed from agricultural use and devoted to the common exploration of our interconnected existence.

Joana Escoval, The Sun Lovers, 16 January until 16 February 2019, Tenderpixel, London, UK

Joana Escoval solo exhibition.

Some people believe the Sun used to be yellow, Julia Crabtree & William Evans, Elena Damiani, Rowena Harris, Adrien Missika, Ana Vaz, 14 December 2018 until 27 January 2019, Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest, Hungary

The exhibition transplants us into a fictional landscape. It is a strange, yet familiar place, potentially of the future. Clearly dependent on human interaction, it is a result of complex forces, pre-determined by hybrid histories.

Worlds open inside a shell, 28 September 2018, Blitz, Valletta, Malta

For the closing event of her residency at Blitz, curator Borbála Soós creates an exhibition in a form of a talk. Bringing the audience on a journey evoking a series of existing and imagined spaces in Malta and on other similar islands, she flexibly opens up the mind to what a space of an exhibition could contain, expanding and contracting along the way.

Becoming Plant, Victoria Adam, Julia Crabtree & William Evans, Ingela Ihrman, Paloma Proudfoot, André Romão, 11 July until 22 September 2018, Tenderpixel, London, UK

Plant: You are obsessed with things to come... Just a thought, maybe instead of going crazy over this, you need to embrace what’s around you, here and now. Like your first proposition about metamorphoses. Can’t you notice how we all mutually constitute each other in codependency? If you think about it this way: we might go to heaven , or to hell, but either way, we will be still mutually reliant on each other...

Becoming Animal, Petra Feriancová and Nicolás Lamas, 16 May until 30 June 2018, Tenderpixel, London, UK

These two interrelated solo exhibitions by Petra Feriancová and Nicolás Lamas look at our current times as a moment when complex systems and ecologies are more and more vulnerable, and in fact quickly falling apart. They consider instances of accelerated entropy as moments when transformations happen.

Pakui Hardware: The Return of Sweetness, 17 March until 28 April 2018, Tenderpixel, London, UK

Metabolism is not personal. It is engineered. The metabolism of cells rewired to get more efficient, to grant them the ability to generate new products. Fuels, chemicals, foods, and drugs. Not entirely artificial, not wholly organic. Perfect enough to keep the engines running. Just make sure to keep the by-products in a dark dry place.

A Gesture Towards Transformation, with Aimar Arriola, Nicole Bachmann, Omer Fast, Pedro G. Romero, Paul Maheke, Amalia Pica, 4 October until 25 November 2017, Tenderpixel, London, UK

Expanding the idea of the present, the works in this show were conceived and enacted at various historical moments over the last two decades, and yet remain viscerally relevant to our current times. Carrying the potential for transformation and activism, rather than being directly reactionary to contemporary politics, they build a new language and meaning bottom up, and through their own logic. Rather than creating utopian or parallel circumstances, the works exist in this reality and articulate empowering statements.

Andy Holden Borbala Soos Nicoline van Harskamp, Borbala Soos

Forecasting a Broken Past, with Can Altay, Andy Holden, Nicoline van Harskamp, Gergely László, Tamás Kaszás, Katarina Šević, 27 September until 28 October 2017, this exhibition was part of the OFF-Biennale Budapest, hosted by aqb Project Space, Budapest, Hungary

The multiple voices within the exhibition reflect on stories about communities that are formed through shared attitudes and aspirations. Sharing these accounts of various modernist utopian, avant-garde, Marxist, anarchist, or even naive teenage strategies provides an opportunity to transfer their energies into contemporary structures of thought.

Mushrooms on the Ruins, Installation view, Iza Tarasewicz, Salvatore Arancio Borbala Soos Salvatore Arancio Blower Borbala Soos

Mushrooms on the Ruins, with  Salvatore Arancio, Olivier Castel, Petra Feriancová, Iza Tarasewicz, 27 May until 22 July 2017, Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid, Spain

The exhibition maps relations between various species in a landscape both strange and familiar. It strives to open up a world of imagination where all other beings have the same agency as humans, and where, if you wish, species are capable or becoming, or transforming into one another.

David Ferrando Giraut David Ferrando Giraut, CATOPTROPHILIA, installation view. Borbala Soos David Ferrando Giraut

David Ferrando Giraut, The Accursed Stare, 22 March until 22 April 2017, Tenderpixel, London, UK

The two interconnected projects in the exhibition spring from David Ferrando Giraut's ongoing research on humans’ relation with images throughout history. Using the tensions between representation and represented reality as a cognitive tool, the show highlights how capital colonises aesthetic experience.

Tropical Hangover, Installation view with works by Salvatore Arancio and Zuzanna Czebatul. Tenderpixel. Laure Prouvost, IDEALLY ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING HERE WOULD BE COVERED IN MUSSELS, 2011. Courtesy of the artist, carlier | gebauer and Tenderpixel. Tropical Hangover, Installation view with works by Suzanne Treister and Salvatore Arancio. Tenderpixel.

Tropical Hangover, with Salvatore Arancio, Zuzanna Czebatul, Rowena Harris, Laure Prouvost, Suzanne Treister, 8 February until 4 March 2017, Tenderpixel, London, UK

Imagine a land full of swamps emitting suffocatingly sweet scents in the heat. The air is thick with poisonous substances left over after the party, which involved snorting and getting high on the lusciousness of the Earth. The intoxicating dance of consuming degenerates into entropy. Rhizomatic connections happen underground, underwater, and in the air. Algorithms mimic natural growth. Cells permutate and exchange. The senses are overloaded with the magical and the exotic, while we wonder about a nature after nature...

Rehana Zaman, Tell me the story Of all these things, 30 November 2016 until 28 January 2017, Tenderpixel, London

Tell me the story Of all these things is an accumulation of several narrative threads drawing together intimate conversations between the artist and her two sisters, ominous animated visions of a metamorphosing body, e-learning training on Prevent, and staged, performed gestures. The work takes its title from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, a novel that deploys a variety of texts to examine themes of dislocation and fragmentation. Taking Cha’s work as a departure point, the exhibitions explores processes of disassembling as constitutive of lived experience.

Spatial Practices and the Urban Commons, reading room. Borbála Soós Spatial Practices and the Urban Commons, reading room.

Spatial Practices and the Urban Commons, with Can Altay, Thomas Dobson, Fernando García-Dory, Sabel Gavaldon, Adelita Husni-Bey, Matthew Fuller, Platon Issaias, Tim Ivison, Just Space, Adam Kaasa, Josie McVitty, Godofredo Pereira, Emily Rosamond, Louise Shelley, Squash, Tijana Stevanović, Ben Vickers, Joanna Warsza, 9 April until 4 June 2016, Tenderpixel, London, UK

The event series took shape in variety of formats, including talks, discussions, seminars, workshops, tours and publication launches. The gallery also hosted an exhibition, including a research library and a debate space on the ground floor, and a screening downstairs. Can Altay's ongoing journal, 'Ahali, Setting a Setting' unfolded into an installation, including new contributions. Adelita Husi-Bey's video ‘Ard’ (Land), 2014 presented a specific case study of ‘Cairo 2050’, a government-backed and privately funded metropolitan development plan of epic proportions, which threatens the livelihood of many settlements...

The Infinite Lawn. Petra Feriancová, Yann Sérandour. Installation View.
 Borbala Soos Yann Sérandour Bookstack, 2005. Petra Feriancová, Survivals, Relics, Souvenirs
. Cyclops’ Necklace, 2013.

The Infinite Lawn, Adriano Amaral, Vanessa Billy, Petra Feriancová, Falke Pisano, Yann Sérandour, Ian Whittlesea, 17 July until 15 August 2015, Tenderpixel, London, UK

'Mr. Palomar's mind has wandered, he has stopped pulling up weeds. He no longer thinks of the lawn: he thinks of the universe. He is trying to apply to the universe everything he has thought about the lawn. The universe as regular and ordered cosmos or as chaotic proliferation. The universe perhaps finite but countless, unstable within its borders, which discloses other universes within itself. The universe, collection of celestial bodies, nebulas, fine dust, force fields, intersections of fields, collections of collections.' – Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar ...

Olivier Castel, Mimesis. Florian Roithmayr, Endstart no.5 Borbala Soos Ian law, Infirm Arbroath, Borbala Soos Florian Roithmayr, Loose Tension

Things That Tumble Twice, Olivier Castel, Ian Law, Florian Roithmayr, 29 March until 6 May 2015, Tenderpixel, London, UK

Taking place in both gallery spaces of Tenderpixel, the exhibition Things That Tumble Twice looks at the sphere of duality. It recalls ideas of juxtaposition, complementarity and interrelated parts (i.e. matter and its absence, light and darkness, signifier and significant, thesis and antithesis, animate and inanimate objects, 0 s and 1s, yin and yang). On the other hand, and at the same time, the exhibition in its entirety is informed by the principle of multiplicity as becoming and unity— as something that cannot be described as the sum of its parts or qualities but simply as an irreducible whole (i.e. complex systems, hermeneutic circle, organicism, life, a cloud)...

Reading Room, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Hold Your Ground, Borbala Soos Adelita Husni-Bey, Agency, 2012, Borbala Soos

Collaboration Beyond Consensus – Rehearsing Collectivity, Priscila Fernandes, Adelita Husni-Bey, Krétakör, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Rehana Zaman, May 2015, OFF-Biennale, Budapest, hosted by tranzit.hu, Budapest, Hungary

In his book, ‘The Nightmare of Participation’, first published in 2010, Markus Miessen describes participation, collaboration and collectivity as only pseudo-democratic terms. The words participation and consensus have become increasingly overused, and their uncritical, naive or even romantic applications are frightening. Miessen enters the discussion as an architect, but also advocates for vigorous cross-disciplinary intrusions...

Priscila Fernandes, Naar de Speeltuin!, 2012 Borbala Soos Priscila Fernandes, In Search of the Self, 2010 Borbala Soos Katarina Zdjelar, Everything Is Gonna Be, 2008 Borbola Soos

Social Choreography – an Ecology of Collective Experience, Julie Born Schwartz, Priscila Fernandes, Adelita Husni-Bey, Rosalind Nashashibi, Katarina Zdjelar, 5, 6,7 March 2015, Tenderpixel, London, UK

‘[...]dancing together is as much about how we come together to enact a community as it is about enacting and expressing the ideological framework that a community requires to persist. It is about doing community, as action and as ideology.’
– Benjamin Pohlig on Social choreography...

Feiko Beckers, The Exact Opposite of the Exact Opposite, Borbala Soos Jacopo Miliani, Folding Characters, Borbala Soos Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Uncanny Valley, Borbala Soos

Acting Truthfully Under the Circumstances, Feiko Beckers, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Jacopo Miliani, Timothy Ivison and Julia Tcharfas, Rehana Zaman,14 November until 20 December 2014, Tenderpixel, London, UK

The exhibition considers artworks that use the structure of the stage and certain conventions of scriptwriting as a framework for investigations into relationships, social interactions, and political ecologies. Taking theatre as an open ended process with its multiple contexts and references, the exhibition acts as catalyst for performances, screenings, talks and other forms of engagement...

Toril Johannessen, Unlearning Optical Illusions, 2013, Fiona Shaw, The Marker Panels, 2013 Fernando García-Dory, The State of Things, 2013

Past performance is the best indicator of future results, Fernando García-Dory, Toril Johannessen, Fiona Shaw, 18 October until 16 November 2013, Tenderpixel, London, UK

Karel Miler Grating Cevdet Erek, Ruler 0-Now, 2008 Dóra Maurer. Timing, 1973-80, film still Borbala Soos

Of Parameters. Measurable Truths, Definitive Outcome, Tomas Chaffe, Cevdet Erek, Marcell Esterházy, Dóra Maurer, Karel Miler, 22 February until 23 March 2013, Tenderpixel, London, UK

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Georg Cantor revolutionised mathematics with the concept of a set. Not only a collection of objects, a set includes the rules we apply to them. By multiplying the reservoir of parameters conveyed through situations, objects and scores, the works in this exhibition plead for the rediscovery and conscious reflection on the construction of reality...

Joachim_Koester, film still, 2009, Borbala Soos Installation view, Henry Moore Gallery, Royal College of Art, Amalia Pica and Patrizio di Massimo Ritual without Myth, exhibition catalogue, 2012

Ritual without Myth, Danai Anesiadou, Asco, Erick Beltrán, Lygia Clark, Patrizio Di Massimo, Joachim Koester, Ioana Nemes, Ocaña, Amalia Pica, Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Royal College of Art, 8 until 25 March 2012, Henry Moore Gallery, London, UK

This exhibition brings together practices that revisit the idea of RITUAL as a catalyst for transformative experience; a notion explored in the work of Lygia Clark (‘I manipulate the rite without the myth’). Her work, which existed only through the agency and subjective experience of an audience, acts as a point of departure from which to re-examine the function of ritual today. By exploring ritual as medium, Clark shifts the focus from the field of the spiritual to patterns of social interaction, creating potential for the production of alternative forms of subjectivity.

This exhibition brings together practices that interrogate MYTH as a set of beliefs that sustain our social structures. In the works presented, different bodies of culture are devoured and devour in turn; a strategy that can be related to the concept of antropofagia (the cannibalisation of culture, as first defined within Brazilian avant-gardes). Rather than incorporating the other, this process involves a transformation, a becoming. Devouring mythologies allows the possibility of re signifying them, in order to decentre the colonial, social and sexual norms that constitute modernity...

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