My exhibition accompanying my doctoral research at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design brought together a selection of works from my artistic intervention at the Museum of Ethnography in 2023, alongside works created in parallel with my research on traps.
My dissertation – The Application of the Trap as a Metacritical Model at the Intersections of Peasant Culture and Contemporary Art – examines the question of autonomy in contemporary art through the concept of the trap. It takes as its starting points the anthropological understanding of traps and the conditions of artistic practice within institutional frameworks.
Throughout my research, I observed that the production and interpretation of artistic projects often unfold within situations of entrapment that operate on five levels: ideological, sociopolitical (culture wars), institutional (museums and artistic research), affective (trauma-based art), and reflexive (paranoid reading). To identify and examine these dynamics, I developed a metacritical trap model based on five defining characteristics: concealment, mediation, transformation, constructedness, and hierarchy. The model serves as both a diagnostic tool and a framework for artistic practice.
The theoretical framework draws on ideology critique; theories of culture wars and hegemony; institutional critique and artistic research; trauma and affect theory; and theories of paranoid and reparative reading.
My central argument is that the trap model does not offer a means of eliminating the forces and conditions that shape artistic practice, but rather a way of negotiating them with greater awareness and competence. Autonomy, in this sense, is not a fixed state but an ongoing process of fine-tuning within artistic practice, in which somatic practice (Weil) and the artwork conceived as a “good trap” (Danto, Gell) can play a crucial role.
