Who’s Laughing Now? group exhibiton at Art Quarter Budapest
Date: 3 October, 2025 to 29 November, 2025
Location: Art Quarter Budapest, Hungary
Artists: FAJGERNÉ DUDÁS Andrea / Anna VASOF / SZABÓ Beáta / MÁTRAI Erik / Franz KONRAD / Gudrun LANG / Markus WILFING / Minaa HAKIM / TÓTH Norbert / Rafael LIPPUNER / René Corvaia KOCH / Wolfgang TEMMEL / zweintopf
Curators: Keyvan PAYDAR / Michael SCHITNIG / KUKLA Krisztián
Humor is a way of being. It is at once a catalyst, a mask and a crack in the surface of order. Laughter can connect and wound, expose and liberate. Its timing can be both bad and good, always ambiguous, always multifaceted. The exhibition Who’s Laughing Now? brings together international artistic positions in which humor serves as a method for transforming reality.
According to Adorno, the comedian breaks the spell of “forever the same”. He opens cracks in the self-evident, displaces familiar patterns, and shakes power. However, humor is not simply a criticism from outside. As Simon Critchley puts it, laughter also leads us to our own limits: it highlights our fragility, the ridiculousness of human frailty, our own failures.
The exhibition moves in this field of tension: between irony and seriousness, grotesque exaggeration and quiet subversion, liberating outburst and painful self-revelation. Humor here does not appear as lightness, but as a double-edged exercise, a medium that simultaneously reveals, disturbs and transforms.
Who’s Laughing Now? asks a seemingly simple but actually difficult question: who is laughing – and why? The echo of this question reveals the elusiveness of humor: its ability to clarify and confuse the present, to create community or dissolve it, to bring close and distance at the same time. Laughter is always ambivalent. Echo, transformation, openness.
The exhibition was created in collaboration between art quarter budapest and Schaumbad – Freies Atelierhaus Graz, creating a dialogue, a kind of “extended meeting” between the two institutions.
