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 part of the research project IMAGINART—Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation. Eszter is on the curatorial team of the grassroots art initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest, with whom she acted as lumbung member at documenta fifteen. She was a team member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance—co-founded by OFF-Biennale Budapest—that collectively curated the Kyiv Biennial in 2021. Eszter worked as curator and editor at tranzit/hu in Budapest between 2011 and 2020. Her research and writing revolve around grassroots art organizing outside state art infrastructures.

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

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, stepping up in hiatus, and finding ways to laugh. All of these gestures are necessary, she thinks, for being and doing in difficult contexts.

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