The Catalyst Award — which has been redefined by tranzit.hu each year — developed from an award into a grant that funds new projects. In 2016, the aim of the call was to facilitate contemporary art — as a form of critical thinking and learning to reach and explore new contexts and locations outside of its usual territory. Therefore, the call for participation took the genre of traveling exhibition as the point of departure. Applicants were asked to reconsider this format, i.e. the traveling exhibition, known from people’s educational movements, and to take special care to facilitate the interpretation of art works and get the artistic message across.

In the framework of the Catalyst project, we continued our mission, which we started years ago. This time we focused on community centers that were built before the socialist era upon civil initiatives or by corporations for their workers’ self-study groups. With our choice of location, we intended to pay tribute to those, who, 100 years ahead of us, created communities and community spaces to satisfy their cultural needs; furthermore, our unconcealed aim was to change the public opinion on community centers, namely, that they are merely the formations of socialist cultural policy.

In the first part of the half-a-year-long series of events, we visited three institutions in the countryside and one in the capital, where organised exhibitions, publications and concerts.

Curator: Dominika Trapp