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Can we live our lives radically differently? Where does the thread of our fate lead? Can we imagine living a life of a completely different quality than heretofore? HAB exhibitions most often explore themes crucial to our human condition, to humaneness, to humanity at large, which also emerge as creative causes in art. One such theme is the possibility of radical change. Amid the multiple crises of today’s world, this is more relevant than ever. Its practical significance cannot be ignored, as being under threat invariably calls for a radical turn in our lives. At the same time, practical change is always accompanied by spiritual and psychological work, and these processes may set in motion a fundamental transformation, while the very basis of our existence may be called into question.

The HAB exhibition Conversion. Radical Encounters explores this change of heart, this volte-face, by presenting a variety of genres, media, perspectives, and attitudes. The material divided into separate sections draws on works by both Old Masters and young contemporary artists, including such superstars as Turner Prize-winner Mark Wallinger, Berndnaut Smilde or Keith Milow. Ostensibly, a common feature of the works is that very few of them represent the experience of conversion; they predominantly invite the viewer to contribute to the work with an active agency.

The insight that we take away from this exhibition may be that a turn of fate is only possible if we let go of the world as we have conceived of it. A turn of fate is therefore a kind of conversion. Not necessarily (or not only) to a specific Judeo-Christian god, nor to a Dionysian archetypal figure of sanctity, nor even to a hollow and abstract transcendence. We arrive at our unveiled truth, whose reality irresistibly invades our lives and takes control of our destiny.

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The exhibition of HAB Sculpture Park by two sculptors for the Fall consists of works in conversation with each other. Metal as matter is a common language for both of them – resistant, yet shaped, cold but sensitive. The exhibition showcases paradoxes in the material: weight and light, structure and surface, humane gesture and artificial trace. The sensitivity of the materials when encountered in a common space establishes a dialogue in itself. 

In the works of Antal Plank steel is the carrier of movement, colour and rhythm. Steel carries simoultaneously the raw strength of the industrual world, and the subtleness of geometry. Colour is the natural part of the surface, it does not ornament, but becomes an energy that transforms matter into living presence. Beyond every geometrical structure there is the humane gesture: the balance of order and play. 

In the pieces by Andor Becskei metal turns into fragility. Welding, burning and oxidation are not hidden, but become part of the work as if the matter breathed. Sculptures hover between rigid and organic: metal does not resist, but allows. The works carry paradoxes: the organic forms of seemingly soft textile are made of steelthreads. Their soft curves are counterposed by the angular postaments. 

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The beaten track is a metaphor for habit, of cultural and perceptual conditioning, which confines the world to a recognizable order of forms. Beyond this lies a departure from order, a transgression of the boundaries of perception, knowledge, and meaning, a mapping of side roads, blind spots, and unfamiliar spaces. The international group exhibition Access Is off the Beaten Track seeks inroads to these. The exhibits open up spaces and experiences where the perception of reality is disrupted and certainty is replaced by the strangeness lurking within the familiar.

Decay, the instability of the body and matter at large, and the perception of hidden and invisible forces in art are symptomatic expressions of a collective destabilization that affects the subject, identity, the environment, and our perception of reality alike. Today, the aesthetic experiences are metaphors not so much for an uncanny, unburied past, but for an uncertain perception of reality in the present.

The exhibition seeks to explore this contemporary restlessness, the mental and physical spaces defined by absence, tension, and fragmentation. 

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