PARALLEL ART FOUNDATION
Anna
Járai
Habitus
(Hungaricum Metamorphoses
IV.)
Cairo Contemporary, Budapest
2026 09 04–10 14
In folk belief, the red boot appears as a means of taming a forest creature known as the ‘wild maiden’, which can be interpreted as a symbol of coercion into the patriarchal order. The work subverts and reclaims this symbol: the boot becomes the embodiment of Virginia Woolf’s ‘a room of one’s own’, taking on monumental proportions and providing a space for the experience of a wild, autonomous inner world. In this way, the process of taming is turned inwards; rather than subduing our inner wildness, it reinforces self-discovery, liberation and reclaiming.
Anna Járai, a Budapest-based filmmaker and visual artist, explores the themes of embodiment and memory from a feminist critical perspective, creating research- and performance-based, cross-genre works including videos, photographs and installations. She draws inspiration from folklore, family history and local history, which she frequently references in her ritual reinterpretations. The installation entitled Habitus is a spatial representation of the latest piece in the Hungarikum Metamorphoses photographic series.
In 2022, she graduated from the Film programme at Falmouth University in England, and in 2026, she graduated with an MA in Fine Art from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Her work has been shown at international film festivals and institutions such as the Encounters Film Festival in Bristol, the Millennium Film Workshop in New York, the Mayfair Art Weekend in London, and most recently at The Ladder in Redruth. In Budapest, her works were on display at the group exhibition The Land Interviewed at the Tér-Kép Gallery, as well as at the Turbina Cultural Centre’s exhibition Fluid Identities, Post-Hungarian Realities. In the spring of 2026, she was a fellow on a residency programme organised by Studio Rizoma in Palermo and European Alternatives, where she explored the themes of artistic activism and translocal solidarity. In early July, at the 5th Urban Camp organised by Tranzit.hu, she led a participatory art workshop based on the theories of Silvia Federici, in which participants created experimental animations whilst exploring the social significance of gossip.
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On view 0-24h
Cairo Contemporary, 1071 Budapest, Lövölde tér 7.
Supported by Erzsébetváros Municipality, Hungarian Academy of Arts
Cooperation partner: Bischitz Johanna Integrated Human Service Centre
instagram.com/Cairo.Contemporary
instagram.com/parallel.art.foundation
Ditte Marie Frost [DK]
Father’s Three Hands
2026, 09 04—10 14
PUCCS Contemporary, Budapest
The installation Father’s Three Hands revolves around themes of trust, power dynamics, and manipulation, as well as societal imbalances and darker sides. Additionally, the work explores impermanence in both material and organic contexts. The visual expression of the piece draws from human anatomy, with the artist's specific inspiration stemming from educational anatomical charts of hands.
The artwork consists of three free-hanging surfaces sewn together from textiles and shaped like three hands. Measuring 250 cm each, the three pieces are suspended from the ceiling by metal chains.
Father’s Three Hands is crafted from coarse and fine linen, silk, and tulle. The nearly transparent silk and tulle stand in sharp contrast to the rough linen. The textiles have been treated using a graphic technique where patinated copper creates a turquoise print on the fabric. Furthermore, the linen has been colored using metal water and imprint from chains, leaving the material with deep brown shades. The combination of the textile's texture and the metal's patina creates a visual effect that evokes the decay of the body, exposing flesh and bone through the process of decomposition.
The title Father’s Three Hands refers to the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In this installation, however, the hands take on a different meaning. They do not point toward harmony, but toward a world marked by unrest and inequality. Two of the hands form a pair, while the third stands apart, suggesting something uncontrollable and disruptive. The focus shifts from the divine to the primal and fragile aspects of human nature—the sides we cannot always control, such as violence, betrayal, hidden intentions, and paralysis.
In her practice, Ditte Marie Frost takes her point of departure in the subconscious and the obscured aspects of our world, where everything is in constant flux. Frost works across the mediums of installation, sculpture, and painting, using materials such as oxidized copper, steel, brass, iron, oil paint, and textiles.
In her works, Frost combines sculptural elements made from various metals and textiles. The textiles are bleached and patinated by oxidized metals through a specialized technique. Frost is drawn to the utilization of chemical processes, as they leave an expression in the works that balances between the uncontrollable and the predictable. The patination and corrosion processes used in Frost’s works reflect one of the overarching themes in her practice: impermanence and transformation.
Frost’s motifs draw from insects, weapons, and human and animal bodies. By combining bodily figurations with oxidized metals, she creates a space that oscillates between destruction and creation. For her motifs, Frost finds inspiration in alchemy, religion, and film—particularly genres such as horror, sci-fi, and body horror. In her artistic practice, Frost is furthermore inspired by Julia Kristeva's and Carl Jung's ideas on consciousness.
Ditte Marie Frost is a Danish visual artist (born 1992) who graduated from Funen Art Academy in Odense (2015-2020), which included an exchange program at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2018-2019). In 2022 she had her first institutional solo exhibition at Platform in Nikolaj Kunsthal. Additionally, her work has been exhibited in the Round Tower in Copenhagen and at Cantina in Aarhus, among other venues.
[photo: Mikkel Kaldal]
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On view 0-24h
PUCCS Contemporary Art, 1084 Budapest, Víg u. 22.
Curator: Gábor Pintér
Supported by Hungarian Academy of Arts, Statens Kunstfond (Danish Arts Foundation), Kulturudviklingspuljen (Cultural Development Fund - Aarhus)
Bianka Dobó
28 m²
2026.10.21.
– 11.29.
PUCCS
Contemporary, Budapest
Flag-raising: 21 October 2026, 18:00
Contributors: József Mélyi, Bianka Dobó
Standing in front of the gallery’s window, the viewer finds himself facing a single flag measuring 4 m by 7 m. The title refers to the flag’s 28-square-meter surface area, which is the same as that of the national flag in Kossuth Square. Over the past twenty years, increasingly large-scale flags have appeared in public spaces throughout Hungary as instruments of state and national representation. Building on this, the work examines the flag’s symbolic and physical presence and its gesture of occupying space. Placing the flag from Kossuth Square in a window space can also be interpreted as a horizontal reimagining of vertical state representation. By juxtaposing the physical boundaries of the flag and the exhibition space, the relationship between national and personal space becomes the focus of the investigation: how and to what extent we can feel ourselves to be part of the nation—or, conversely, excluded from it. The monumental size of the flag in the confined exhibition space in and of itself illustrates the phenomenon of politics seeping into micro-communities and conveys the resulting claustrophobia, which is both spatial and psychological. The work explores how the flag — which represents, occupies, and demarcates boundaries — can transform from a sign of belonging to a community into a symbol of the occupation of space, or even a tool of exclusion.
The central theme of Bianka Dobó’s research and artistic practice is the relationship between public artworks, monuments and their surroundings; changes in the built environment; and the power and social implications of practices relating to public space planning and the politics of memory. In her installations, paintings, graphic works and sculptures, she works with a variety of materials. Her working method is characterised by continuous experimentation. She graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2008/2009 with degrees in Printmaking and Visual Arts Education, where, in 2024, she obtained a PhD as well. She is currently a lecturer at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.
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On view 0-24h
PUCCS Contemporary Art, 1084 Budapest, Víg u. 22.
Organised by P arallel Art Foundation
Curator: Gábor Pintér
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Eszter
Metzing
Lymph
2026.10.21.–11.29.
Cairo Contemporary
Related event: 2026.11.27.–29. Art Weekend Budapest, guided tour
Eszter Metzing’s installation is entitled Lymph, a term referring to the translucent bodily fluid circulating between tissues, which, as the body’s internal water, permeates and connects everything. In its archaic, folk meaning, it also denotes damp, moist earth, thus evoking both the interior of the body and the landscape, water and earth. Lymph is an intimate fluid belonging to the body’s hidden, invisible layers, which we can now nevertheless glimpse through the shop window glass.
With this work, the artist seeks to create a sensory situation that, through the visual experience, awakens the viewer’s skin awareness, their desire to touch, and an awareness of their own gaze. Distance thus makes the absence of touch perceptible. At the same time, it invites the viewer to move beyond a human-centred perspective and to take notice of the presence of non-human beings, materials and water in our shared existence.
One of the central themes of the installation is the tension between the desire to touch and the inability to do so, a tension further heightened by the characteristics of the Cairo display: the work can only be viewed through the glass wall. This wall is transparent, so the forms and the presence are visually perceptible; at the same time, it sets a boundary, separates and conceals. The installation adopts the inviting gesture of the shop window’s traditional function and imbues it with gestures of exploration, revelation and initiation.
Intimacy here has a dual meaning. On the one hand, the soft, organic, body-like form, with the ‘moisture seeping from it’, offers a sight that may make the viewer feel it is forbidden, perhaps indecent, and something they are not entitled to see. On the other hand, the work also builds on the interplay between secretly desired voyeurism and the possibility of being observed, through which the viewer is involuntarily cast into the role of the secret observer, thereby reinforcing the intimacy of what is ‘spied upon’.
The lymphatic system is the body’s defence and filtration system, the medium of exchange between the internal and the external. Thus it is linked to the skin, the permeable membrane, and the separating yet transparent wall of the shop window. The process, however, cannot be completed: there is no entry, no direct encounter. The tension between desire and prohibition – arising from the nature of the exhibition space – persists day and night.
In terms of materials, the installation is a mostly white, continuous, sprawling “body” composed of felted wool, cotton canvas, and faux fur, in which elements made of borosilicate glass evoke the circulation of an internal fluid and its seepage to the surface.
Eszter Metzing graduated in 2018 from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts with a degree in graphic art, and her embroidered final-year project, entitled Inner Garden, already attracted considerable professional attention. She is an artist at the INDA Gallery, where she held major solo exhibitions in 2021 and 2024. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at, amongst others, the Hungarian National Gallery (Intertwined, 2025), the Kastner Kommunity (Everyone was a child, 2024) and the Lajos Vajda Studio in Szentendre (I Surfaced From a Deep, Swampy Sleep, 2026). Abroad, she has exhibited in Paris, London, Brussels, Novi Sad and the Polish town of Ustka. The latter was part of the Baltic Contemporary Art Gallery’s two-month residency programme (2026). She also took part in the Styrian Artist in Residence programme in Graz (2025), the Artist-in-Residence Programme in Salzburg (2025), and the KAIR Košice Artist in Residence programme in Slovakia (2026).
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On view 0-24h
Cairo Contemporary, 1071 Budapest, Lövölde tér 7.
Curator: Gábor Pintér
Supported by Erzsébetváros Municipality, Hungarian Academy of Arts
Cooperation partner: Bischitz Johanna Integrated Human Service Centre
instagram.com/Cairo.Contemporary
instagram.com/parallel.art.foundation
Mátyás Fusz
No bottom, no top
Cairo Contemporary, Budapest
2026, May 22 - August 30
“I’m not sure where a mountain begins. Is there a clear line, a stream, or a low point beyond which everything above counts as a mountain?
Then, up there, I have been to peaks that were very flat—almost like plateaus—and I have even turned back a few hundred meters before reaching the summit. Partly because I am afraid of heights, and partly because, when I am exhausted, I can easily come to terms with the idea that I will not finish this all the way through.
Maybe that is also, why there is about 10 square centimetres of panelling missing from the top of my house. Back then, I got tired and climbed down from the ladder, thinking I would finish it later, but I never went back up there. There is no need to panic—it is not leaking—but still.
The exhibition plays on this 99-percent-of-the-time character, creating hiding places and unavoidable priorities for it.”
Mátyás Fusz explores the subjective and objective boundaries of perception primarily through sculptures, objects, and installations. His works and series, which depict the possibilities—or indeed the impossibilities—of defining what is different and what is the same, are studies of the simplest possible cases.
He graduated as a painter from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Pécs in 2009 and earned his Ph.D. from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2021. He has had solo exhibitions at the Budapest Gallery, the Kisterem Gallery, and the Liget Gallery, among others, and has participated in group exhibitions at the Kiscelli Museum, the Vasarely Museum, and the M21 Gallery in Pécs. In 2023, he won the Leopold Bloom Fine Arts Award.
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On view 0-24h
Cairo Contemporary, 1071 Budapest, Lövölde tér 7.
Organised by Parallel Art Foundation
Curator: Gábor Pintér
Supported by Hungarian Academy of Arts
Cooperation partner: Bischitz Johanna Integrated Human Service Centre
instagram.com/Cairo.Contemporary
instagram.com/parallel.art.foundation