OFF-Biennale Budapest X DWH

From Budapest to Vienna: OFF-Biennale Guest Events at DAS WEISSE HAUS

Installation Activation:
“Sorrow, sorrow, you’re too heavy” / Let’s release our burdens together
by Dorottya Szonja Koltay
July 4, 2025
5 – 7 pm

Performance:
Folkdance Inclusive / queer-inclusive Hungarian dance house
by gergő d. farkas, Balázs Oláh and Júlia Vavra
July 4, 2025
7 – 9 pm

Walls are erected when a sense of insecurity takes hold—between nations, peoples, and cultures, both externally and within. Brick by brick, decree by decree, word by word, they rise—obstructing oversight, empathy, and understanding. As multiple crises intensify and converge, we find ourselves on shifting ground, desperately trying to cling to a sense of existential, financial and social security.

This year, OFF-Biennale Budapest marks a decade of collaborative efforts as a grassroots organization and independent platform. Through its diverse activities, OFF-Biennale aims to strengthen the local independent art scene, and to contribute to public discourse on social, political and environmental issues, with the intention of promoting a culture of democracy through art.

The 5th anniversary edition revolves around the concept of “security”—a term often invoked and distorted in public discourse, largely shaped by populist right-wing rhetoric. The selected artworks engage with the theme of security while addressing interconnected issues such as systemic inequality, control, marginalization, the impact of armed conflicts, migration, decoloniality, the climate crisis, queer ecologies, domestic violence, bodily autonomy, and feminist resistance. The works on display employ a range of strategies, including absurd humor, practices of pleasure, and playfulness, to reflect on our current condition, urgencies, and challenges. At the same time, they look to a wealth of knowledge and civic practices for building alliances, solidarity, and sustainable, meaningful ways of living together.

The biennale takes place across various venues in Budapest from May 8 to June 15, 2025, followed by events in several European cities—Vienna, Amsterdam, Oldenburg and Limerick—through various partnerships. In this context OFF-Biennale will present several performative acts on July 4 in Das Weisse Haus. Additionally, you can have a seat and browse though the OFF-Biennale reading corner presenting own publications and different printed materials related to its diverse activities.

OFF-Biennale Budapest is a grassroots initiative providing a platform for progressive, critical contemporary visual art. Since 2014, it has been organizing large-scale international art events based on a broad collaboration of local stakeholders and international partners. Through its diverse activities, OFF-Biennale aims to strengthen the local independent art scene, and to contribute to public discourse on social, political and environmental issues, with the intention of promoting a culture of democracy through art.

OFF has been functioning as a project-organization without institutional infrastructure or state funding of any kind, as it boycotts the Hungarian state-run art infrastructure. This is a political statement as much as a practical solution to protect freedom of artistic expression and professional integrity.

In a political climate not conducive to civil and cultural self-organization and activism, OFF-Biennale remained one of the few art NGOs in Budapest still actively working on creating and maintaining ground for free speech, reinforcing independence, and prefiguring a model for a transparent and autonomous art institution which gains resilience from its wide-ranging networks.

Within the last 10 years OFF-Biennale has established itself as the largest independent contemporary art event in Hungary. At the same time the organization has also built up an international reputation, among others by the participation at documenta fifteen (2022, Kassel/Germany) as one of the core groups of the “lumbung interlokal”, a network based on resource sharing and community.

The curatorial team of OFF-Biennale consists of art professionals who have been holding prestigious positions in the Hungarian art scene. Their professional commitment to maintaining OFF-Biennale under challenging conditions throughout the years is recognized both in the Hungarian and international cultural life. As the latest acknowledgment of this committed work, in 2023 OFF-Biennale was one of the recipients of the Goethe Medal.