In the past months, three resident artists, Ludmila Hrachovinová, Brooke Leifso and Ari-Pekka Leinonen have been working in a shared studio space in aqb. For their final presentation of the residency and their introduction to the local audience, they will share the aqb’s gallery, the Project Space. On Friday 13 December, Brooke Leifso's performance series will literally introduce you to this space, which will be complemented on 14 December by paintings and drawings by Ludmila Hrachovinová and sound performance and installations by Ari-Pekka Leinonen. Local artists will join the event series, Júlia Kerekes will hold a workshop and the audience can immerse themself into the Ereklia happening of Beáta Szabó at the Mines as well.
The exhibition space will also host interventions by the artists of the house, workshops, flea markets, performative and musical experiences on Saturday, and the evening will be crowned with a dinner and aqbs end-of-year party.

13 December

6 pm - 7 pm
Brooke Leifso: Body Work
Venue: Foyer (B building, 3. floor)

Body Work is a series of short performances that delve into the visceral reality of Brooke’s experience of being in her body and mind. The series uses accessibility, phenomenological methods, and performed metaphor to let an audience into another's lived experience. Body Work will feature Duo of Simple Studies in Dis/ability with Michael Winter. The score is deceptively simple, amplifying the difference of breath and body through sonic practices.

14 December

4 pm - 7 pm
Júlia Kerekes: MONOBONC workshop  
Venue: aqb Project Space

Monobonc invites you to disrupt blackened autopsy tables. In tune with the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, our starting point shifts to darkness from light. The decomposition of black paint offers us the greyness of the table. By coating and printing the paper material, we transfer the surface, allowing space for the element of light to return.
Come and get blackened then purified again!

4 pm - 8 pm
Ludmila Hrachovinová: Common Spaces, Private Gaps  
Venue: aqb Project Space

What I find important in experiencing my work is the reminder of one's presence, communication with the space, and the viewer’s body. In my paintings and drawings, I try to recreate various feelings based on my body's memory. This refers to physical presence, such as the awareness of your body after sitting for long hours in front of a computer, for example, and sensations like stretching, bending, rotating, pushing, and pulling. It also reflects emotional states that show in the body, like stress, discomfort, pressure, release, relaxation, tension, energy, uncertainty, shyness, confidence, embarrassment, awkwardness, emotional overload, and emptiness. I do not depict a specific movement or position, or how they look from the outside. I try to recreate some inner feelings of them.
I find everyday situations and subtle movements interesting. How we move through space, how we relate to objects around us, and the balance between the private and the public.
I studied pottery in high school, and the idea of creating a simple ceramic cup from clay, a basic material, has stayed with me. This also shapes my understanding of how we relate to objects. I see this as an ongoing process: one direction from the body to the environment, and the other, how the environment reflects onto the body.
One theme I’ve been interested in for a while is the sitting position. When I arrived at AQB, I found a space to reflect. I’m not completely free; I commute to Bratislava for work. My day job often takes up most of my time. I want to make it clear in my practice that I work, whether in restaurants, shops, or this is my first qualified job at an institution, but this is also a source of my inspiration. Daily life, social interactions, and situations are what inspire me to create a work.
Ludmila Hrachovinová's residency was supported by the Slovak Art Council.

5 pm - 9 pm
Beáta Szabó: Ereklia  
Venue: Mines

In Ereklia, as a woman of science and art, I perform a miracle, turning wine into blood. I present the blood for consumption on a church wafer. I also make some of the blood available to anyone as a mummified relic. All this free of charge. I can not offer instant salvation from the crushing weight of sin, nor eternal life to those who are free enough to believe in their own omnipotence and creative power. Sometimes miracles simply alleviate my angst.

7 pm - 8 pm
Ari-Pekka Leinonen: Adonner  
Venue: aqb Project Space

ADONNER (French: a donner = to give), performance explores through rap music and speculative “sound staging choreography” the phenomenon of giving. A fixed soundtrack dismisses the sound performer and allows the investigation of the roles of a choreographer, a puppeteer, a stagehand, a light designer and many other out of spotlight roles that invisibly give their support to the performer and to the performance. By becoming a “jack-of-all-trades-technician” or a “one-man team”, the performer tries to create a flow of activities that animate the soundtrack and one loudspeaker-headed-puppet. The performance utilises a 9-channel ele-gi-eli sound sculpture plus a new 2-way sculptural loudspeaker. After the performance the stage design, the sound sculptures, the soundtrack and the video documentation will constitute an installation that resurrects and replays the live performance.

ADONNER narrates a story about hearing the last will of Apillione Bustaman, a fictional character, who was looking for another fictional character called ADONNER. During the search Bustaman ends up giving and receiving in several different places, eventually having not much more to give away than the memories of the search. Bustaman takes a bath, eats food, ventures in business, does research, breaks the law, is punished, is sentenced to No-land, escapes from self-denial and drifts to Yo-land, transforms into a bird and saves Funland, flies to the space and sees horror on the earth, is homeless, turns into vampire, is healed by the DJ Fizzy, is shown a good example of asking questions, finds ADONNER and gives the testament and dies.

ADONNER is a prodigal son of a circular economy practised in Brussels. Its music is based on over hundred free 7” records salvaged from the streets, which were later digitised and sampled. The choreography and the rap music is inspired by the natural powers and flow of the Danube river and it draws inspiration from numerous Finnish and international rap music influences. The story is shapeshifted by the city of Budapest and the events that circulate around it. The format of the performance is imaginarily inspired by the unseen puppet-show by Polish director Zygmunt Smandzik, and tries speculatively to give voice to his wordless 45-minute puppet show “Ptak” (bird) premiered in 1975 in Opole, Poland. The puppet-show was discovered from a random book on the bookshelf at Art Quarter Budapest. ADONNER tries to approach the circular economy by borrowing, stealing and relentlessly receiving from already existing.

“Ptak: It was a poem without words, full of lyricism, philosophical suggestions and hints. ….. Ptak shows an ever ending process of creating leaders-idols and gods, and their destruction, the creation and collapse of ideas in which man believed as bringing a promise of a better and fair life, but which were destroyed due to egoisms, and rotten and corrupted governments.”

“… Ptak lasts forty five minutes like a school lesson. It is a lesson of imagination (given by the stage designer) and of thorough, team work (by performers).”

ADONNER was initiated with a support from Arts Promotion Center Finland and was concluded in a 3-month artist residency at Art Quarter Budapest supported by FinnAgora as part of the pARTir initiative funded by the European Union - Next Generation EU.