Spatial Affairs

The exhibition »Spatial Affairs« at Ludwig Múzeum Budapest explores artistic reactions to the questions of spatiality and spatial perception, especially in times of computer-generated virtual reality.

Questioning the inner consistency of space, its philosophical and ontological status, its attachment and relationship to reality, has long been a latent undercurrent in the visual arts. This occasionally passionate, other times rather secretive attachment to such ontological affairs may have caused strong feelings in certain betrayed parties—narrative, for example—yet the relationship has proved to have a persistent hold.

If its termination is unthinkable, questioning around space and its entanglement with reality has also been continually reframed by the proliferation of immaterial spheres that become legitimate parallel dimensions of our perception, expression, experience, knowledge, communication, and analysis. With the arrival of generative imagery, reflecting on this only becomes more pertinent.

Fascination with computers has always been based on the fact that these programmable machines can generate representational and non-representational images, a set of which might add up to an entire virtual reality. The arrival of the computer redefined spatial perception and the idea of immersion; it amplified the mind’s structural tendency to analyse its surroundings and to project and produce alternative spheres.

The exhibition »Spatial Affairs« explores artistic reactions to these matters, including pre- and post-computational approaches from the early avant-garde through conceptualism to very recent works of art. It points at the mutual dependence between the algorithmically created and the palpably real. It embraces the virtual as action, without the agency of matter.

In »Spatial Affairs« the binary relationship between the actual and the virtual, the real and the possible, evaporates into a multidimensionality in which the only betrayed party is dualism, leading to exploded axes of complex and multiplied notions of space.