Sarah Dobai & Little Warsaw

The exhibition brings together works by Budapest based artist collective Little Warsaw and London based artist Sarah Dobai. The premise for the show relates to their ongoing conversation which began with their shared interest in speculative fiction.

The show takes place against the fraught political backdrop in Central Europe and beyond. Like much of Little Warsaw’s practice, Sarah Dobai's films and photographs included here reflect on the unintended consequences of historical circumstance and how this can frame the production and reception of the works in both practical and symbolic ways.

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 (Budapest, 1970) and Bálint Havas (Budapest, 1971), 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.