Bio | Research

Eszter Szakács is a curator, researcher, and Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam, where she is taking part in the project IMAGINART—Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation. Her research, writing, and practice engage with grassroots art organising outside state infrastructures. Together with Naeem Mohaiemen, Eszter coedited the anthology ‘Solidarity Must Be Defended’ (tranzit.hu, 2023) and she curated the exhibition ‘Dóra Maurer–SUMUS–We Are Together’ at de Appel in Amsterdam in 2023, also as part of IMAGINART’s valorisation program. Eszter was part of the curatorial team of the grassroots art initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest (2017–2023), who were also lumbung members and participants at documenta fifteen (2022). She was a team member of the self-organised East Europe Biennial Alliance—co-founded by OFF-Biennale Budapest—that collectively curated the Kyiv Biennial in 2021. Between 2011 and 2020, she worked as curator and editor at tranzit/hu in Budapest.

That, at least, is Eszter’s formal profile. Below is how she would describe her project in more imaginative terms.

Informal bio

Research, curating, postsocialist subjectivity rooted in Hungary—these are some of the things that currently define Eszter. Going back and forth between practice-based theory and theory-based practice, Eszter engages with the creation of structures, cross-connecting projects and initiatives, and finding ways to laugh. All of these gestures are necessary, she thinks, for being and doing in difficult contexts.

Contact: e.szakacs@uva.nl