Screening: Sarah Dobai and LITTLE WARSAW

Friday 10 October 2025
6-9pm

Booking is essential: please contact danielle@daniellearnaud.com
Doors open at 6pm. The screening will start promptly at 6.30pm

Danielle Arnaud is pleased to present a screening of two films featuring Sarah Dobai’s Yard and Little Warsaw’s Game of Changes, followed by a discussion with the artists in conversation with curators and art historians Maja and Reuben Fowkes. The screening event serves as a precursor to the group exhibition of Sarah Dobai and Little Warsaw, opening at Danielle Arnaud in January 2026.

 

Sarah Dobai
Yard 2001

Sarah Dobai Yard 2001, 6 minute single screen projection, 16mm tranferred to 2K

A fixed frame depicts a courtyard at night. The space is at once interior and exterior; a walled room that is outside a building but enclosed by it. Like the classic stage or film set the frame pictures a three sided space, which is viewed from the perspective of a transparent fourth wall. The tungsten lights which illuminate the yard accentuate a doorway and window which opens on it, a dustbin, some potted plants which move gently in the breeze. In the middle of the image a large penetrably dark square registers a passageway which gives onto the street outside. The architecture and lighting of the scene suggest the yard as a kind stage - a space consumed by thesense of expectation it provokes.

The 6 minute film records the duration of an apparent rainstorm in the courtyard which starts suddenly just afterthe beginning of the film and stops equally abruptly just before it send. Though peripheral activity occurs within the frame; a figure passing through the yard, a door opening and closingagain, the rainstorm is the event, the drama and the story of the film.

As the torrential rain pours through the 6 minutes of the work the sense of the tension, expectation and affect that it evokes increases. The intensity of the scenario increases not because the storm becomes more violent but through the cumulative nature of the way that one experiences something through time.

 

LITTLE WARSAW
Game of Changes 2009

LITTLE WARSAW, Game of Changes, 2009, video, 6'30".

A film essay based on the idea of the “time gap” brings together footage from a 1971 and shots taken in 2009, in which the same character is portrayed. The original film material comes from a black and white experimental feature film, in which we can see a student discussing his relation to the outside world in relation to perception, learning and self expression. Later on, this student will become a painter and university professor. He is questioned about the same issues 38 years later. How did he relate to the outside world then and now?

 

The screening will be followed by a discussion between the artists and curators and art historians Maja and Reuben Fowkes.

Sarah Dobai works with photography, film, publication and performance to explore authorship and representation. Her recent works look to classic works of cinema or literature as a means to reflect on contemporary concerns in a historical setting. Her recent film The Donkey Field was shown at Whitechapel Art Gallery, Danielle Arnaud Gallery & the Imperial War Museum (London) and Olomouc Museum of Modern Art. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally and has had recent solo shows at Glassyard Gallery (Budapest), Or Gallery (Vancouver) and FILET (London). She is a Reader in Photography, Text and Film- based Practice and is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts, London.

LITTLE WARSAW is the collaborative practice of András Gálik and Bálint Havas, active since 1995. They live and work in Budapest. Conceived as an evolving project, Little Warsaw addresses historical memory and confronts personal encounters with social experience through films, installations, and a wide variety of media. By examining the role of the artist not only as a producer of images, objects, or situations but as an active agent in shaping the context in which they are embedded, Little Warsaw’s manifold investigations present the artwork itself as a subject of political, sociological, and ideological changes. In recent years, their personal perspectives have become more interwoven with their collaborative work, particularly in how their individual micro-histories and family legends intersect with broader political and social contexts. The radical gestures of intervention in their early works are often complemented by a more poetic form of expression, that of literature. At their solo exhibition at Secession Vienna, they presented a group of works centred around a collectively written novel fragment, Naming You.

Since 2003, Little Warsaw’s work has been widely exhibited internationally. They have had solo exhibitions at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; AZKM; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst GFZK, Leipzig; and Secession, Vienna.Their projects have been included in the 2nd Berlin Biennial; the 50th Venice Biennale; Manifesta 7 in Rovereto; the 12th Bienal de Cuenca; as well as in numerous group exhibitions throughout the world — e.g., Time and Again at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Re_dis_trans – Voltage of Relocation and Displacement at Apexart, New York; and the travelling exhibition Tee with Nefertiti at Mathaf, Doha, Qatar; IVAM, Valencia; and Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Not In My Name at CCA, Tel Aviv; OFF-Biennale, Budapest; and The Problem of God at K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Little Warsaw’s works are held in several prestigious international public and private collections, such as: Centre Pompidou, Paris; MUDAM – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest; Muzeum Współczesne, Wrocław; Kontakt — The Art Collection of ERSTE Foundation, Vienna; Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes; Art Collection Telekom, Frankfurt; and Kadist Foundation, Paris.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are curators and art historians in the Department of History of Art, University of East Anglia and visiting researchers at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. They work on the twentieth-century art history of global socialisms and contemporary artistic engagements with ecology, climate and the Anthropocene. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and East European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), and a special issue of ARTMargins on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (June 2025), along with a forthcoming edited volume Revolutionary Drills: Art and Extractivism in the Socialist Anthropocene (Amsterdam University Press, 2026). Maja is also the author of The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015), and Reuben edited a special issue of Third Text on Actually Existing Art Worlds of Socialism. They publish extensively in peer-reviewed journals, edited books, exhibition catalogues and on contemporary art platforms including Art Monthly, Texte zur Kunst and Springerin, and co-host the SAVA podcast Left to be Desired. Their curated exhibitions include “Colliding Epistemes” at Bozar Brussels (2022) and “Potential Agrarianisms” at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021), and they led the Getty Foundation project Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History (2018-22). Maja is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Consolidator Grant project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) (2022-27).