Mai Manó House – District, VI., 20. Nagymező Street – Budapest
Exhibition opens from May, 25. 2018. until Aug, 16. 2018.
Can be visited through Tuesday – Sunday from Noon – 7 p.m.
Curator: Claudia Küssel, leading curator of Mai Manó House
Dana Lixenberg (1964 Amsterdam, NL) is considered as one of the outstanding voices in contemporary documentary photography.
Her sensitive and personal approach to socially vulnerable communities were close to her. She studied photography at the London College of Printing from 1984 to 1986 and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1987 until 1989. Lixenberg has exhibited at museums and institutions including: Aperture, New York; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Centre Photographique, Rouen; MMK, Frankfurt; The Photographer’s Gallery, London; Busan Biennial, Busan; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; Kunsthal, Rotterdam; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; FOAM, Amsterdam; Frans Halsmuseum De Hallen, Haarlem; and LACPS, Los Angeles.
Dana Lixenberg – Imperial Courts 1993-2015 holds the outcome of a long-term photographic project. In 1992, Lixenberg was asked by a Dutch magazine to travel to South Central Los Angeles and document the tense situation that had arisen in the aftermath of Rodney King’s brutal beating by LA police and the subsequent acquittal of all the police officers who had been at the scene. Lixenberg visited the area of the riots and slowly a relationship evolved with the residents of the Imperial Courts social housing project, in the Watts area of Los Angeles.
In her projects Lixenberg’s focus is often on individuals and communities struggling to survive with dignity amid difficult social conditions. Although the residents were initially wary of Lixenberg, she nevertheless managed to develop a long-term relationship with them. With her large format camera she returned on countless occasions to Imperial Courts over a period of twenty-two years.
Editorial works by Lixenberg are often published in newspapers and magazines such as Newsweek, Vibe, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Last year Lixenberg won the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for her work on the Imperial Courts project. Besides black and white portraits and landscapes, the exhibition at the Mai Mano House comprises of video recordings, an audio installation, and a web documentary. A book that was published on the project by Roma Publications has also won several awards.
The exhibition has been realised with the kind support of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Budapest, the Mondriaan Fund and the National Cultural Fund in Hungary.
Upon press release
Update Aggie Reiter