Lobby / Office Piece adapts the lobby of the Kunstverein Munchen for the Office of the Organisation for Young Artists in Budapest, and involves a circulation of energy, ideas, opportunities and resources.
When Maria Lind invited us to make a work for the show Exchange and Transforn (Arbeitstitel), we proposed to copy Apolonija Šušteršic’s design for the lobby of the Kunstverin as a 1:1 model and put it in the exhibition space, where it also could be used. As part of our proposal, the piece would be moved to Budapest after the exhibition. There it would be installed in the space of the Organization of Young Artists.
Kunstverein München and the Office in Budapest share many ambitions, such as the wish to mediate art and to create a meeting place for people interested in art and artists. Also architecturally, the lobby space in München and the central space of the organization in Budapest bare parallels.
The project finds its roots in an artists exchange program between Budapest and Rotterdam based artists (set up by Bik Van der Pol co-initiators in 1999 ).
Instead of creating new ideas and a new design, Lobby / Office Piece for Budapest emphasizes on principles of circulation and reciprocity as the basis of economic and artistic exchange.
The involvement of all parties, physical or financial, has become part of the project and is therefore indispensable:
Kunstverein München invited Bik Van der Pol to participate in this exhibition. Apolonija Sustersics who designed the lobby of Kunstverein München has generously supported this project by allowing Bik Van der Pol to copy her design and install this inside the exhibition space at KunstVerein München.
The physical work has been done by Bik Van der Pol in collaboration with Budapest based artists Gabor Kerekes, Gergo Kovacs and Tamas Kaszas. The Centre of Visual Arts in Rotterdam and the Mondriaan Foundation supported parts of the research and production of the project.
And after the end of the exhibition in München, the Organization of Young Artists transported the piece to Budapest, where in a joint effort and after a thorough renovation of the space by Bik Van der Pol and the artists from the Organisation of Young Artists, it is now permanently installed and taken into operation.
