I think it’s fair to think of Fotografiska as an art center, as a Kunsthalle, we use the word “museum” for those who don’t speak art world or for those who don’t speak German, because it summarizes what you can expect. You’re going to a space and you’re going to see art. Fotografiska is a Swedish adverb; it means photographic in nature. Fotografiska is, at its core, a space where we exhibit photography. We show every genre of photography, from documentary work to fashion to fine art and so on. And we work with some of the best known names, including Miles Aldridge, Sarah Moon, Annie Leibovitz, David LaChapelle, but also emerging talent that may not have even had a gallery show, let alone an exhibition at a museum. 

And by being deadly serious about photography and by mounting these really remarkable exhibitions, we get to have fun with everything else around the topic of showing work and being a museum. You can have a glass of wine during the exhibition and walk around and talk with friends about art and are invited to have an opinion. Among other things, that’s how we differ from other museums – the ICOM definition of a museum is that it is an educational, not-for-profit institution, so traditional museums see their mission as providing an educational experience. We aim to provide a cultural experience, and fulfill our educational role through interesting programing, conversation-starting artist talks, hands-on workshops, and many other offerings which cultivate a dynamic exchange with our community.

I think that comes from me having owned hotels and restaurants. I don’t see people as visitors – I see them as guests. So, the entire way that we build Fotografiska is to ensure that people have a really positive experience. That begins with putting on really compelling exhibitions. But then, by also having a glass of wine, having a bite, having a meal, having great programing, and being open hours that work for everybody, not just school kids or pensioners or tourists.

In 2010. I invested in it in 2016 and led the global expansion to take it to other fun, culturally vibrant cities. We opened in New York and Tallinn in 2019, and Berlin and Shanghai this year.

Thank you.

I feel genuinely, deeply… How do I feel? Really, deeply proud. On some small level, underappreciated. I really don’t think people understand how hard it is to open a museum. It takes years and years. Opening two museums within six weeks is an incredible feat. And the team has done a remarkable amount of work. 

Fotografiska Berlin is especially important to me; it’s my hometown so I felt a lot of eyes on me and wanted it to be the best possible version that reflects our city. It needed to fit into the cultural landscape, but be a step forward. The old Tacheles building could have easily been a simple beatification of the past. I remember in the 1980s, the people that had been part of the Haight Ashbury in San Fran glorifying the old acid days, and that kind of Gen X version of a throwback driven by a bunch of old white guys felt wrong for Berlin.
And Shanghai, to stand there – the physicality of the building, the way it flows, you’re just in it and you’re like, holy shit, this is awesome. It’s really the best. It’s big and the layout is great. The restaurant is going to be on the ground floor. The top floor has this chill lounge. The exhibition spaces are big and generous and breezy and great. And you have these staircases that we can repurpose, we can put cushions down on them where we can have little talks, but we also have big event spaces for hundreds of people. It’s in a great location and I hope it works, let’s see what happens.

I think the challenge is getting our Chinese audience turned on to the idea of membership. I mean the fact that they can come to the museum, that they can come back, that they can join us, that they can be part of this community if they want to. There are no membership clubs in China, so this is really new to them. It’s not core to our business there, but it’s an interesting thing that we’re going to have to turn people on to.

Being in one of the most exciting cities in the world with some really incredibly well-educated young people that really don’t have a lot to do. You know, unlike New York or Berlin, which have incredibly deeply rich cultural offerings.

We have a Stockholm situation, where there is a really smart young audience that has some money to spend, but there are not a lot of options in terms of culturally-driven events or places. And we’re offering them great food, great music, great art. They get to see art that really feels like theirs; we’re not plying them with the usual suspects. I think it’s a whole new approach to how China interacts with culture or commerce. It’s not this hard sell. It’s like we’re here and we’re pretty cool and if you want to come hang out, you can.

Right. You know, that leads to another point, which is that people are actually looking for a third place. It’s a phrase we’ve heard a lot. I think the third place is important. I don’t think there’s a third place, but there are places that feel like it’s yours and you can come back to it often enough. There is home and there is work. But, where else can you go? Where else can you build a community? People who have moved cities might know 2 or 3 people from the old town, 2 or 3 people from work. How do you make new friends once you’re out of college? Where do you find a community of like-minded people who are culturally curious, on a career track, like to travel, and have the same interests that you have? They’d like to find a partner, they’d like to make new friends. They like to go out to eat. To be part of that community, whether that is around spirituality, whether that’s around business, or whether that’s around the arts, there’s a number of places. And people join multiple clubs. Fotografiska has certainly become a place where people find that kind of community for themselves.

It is. These words often get used interchangeably. Membership matters because you can opt into it, you buy it, and you’re a member. But membership is very much about what you can get out of it – like a discount or access – while community is very much about what you can contribute to it – like giving a talk, doing a workshop, or putting on an event. I think that is a really powerful thing. Fotografiska is a community. You can never force it. You can only seed it and hope it happens. But, so far, we’ve been successful in seeding it and making it happen. There is a membership community around Fotografiska that has a real sense of engagement and ownership around it. People feel like it’s their place. They like the other people here. They like to come here after work and be part of an artist talk, meet friends for drinks or dinner or a club night.

Yes. Summer nights at the Hamburger Bahnhof were really awesome.

I think the people who invented it is MoMA PS1, who already since the mid-90s has been doing incredible programing. I love it. I think it’s great. I hope every museum finds their way there. We don’t compete with any museum. We compete with TikTok and with the Xbox and with Netflix. We have to get people off the couch. We’ve got to get them out. I think being open late is so important. But it’s a tough move for most to make because they’re not staffed for it, their spaces aren’t built for hospitality. The Tate in the late 90s during the early dot.com days had a great Young Collectors night, which was really basically just a giant, fun, dating party.

We are a very important Bumble destination. Look, it’s a great way to meet and spend time with somebody new whom you don’t know; if you can walk around an exhibit with a drink and get them to talk about art, you very quickly have an insight into who they are and how they think about the world.

You know, if Berghain can show art, why can’t museums put up a DJ?

Right.

Yes. And I think that’s an important move. I think we’ve gotten very ivory tower about our institutions. It’s certainly important to give them the respect that they’ve acquired over the hundreds of years and really honor what they’ve accomplished. But it’s also okay to let people just come in and enjoy themselves. There’s a snobbism about people who do selfies but that doesn’t help anybody. I think people can be genuinely culturally curious and take a selfie to let other people know about something really cool and cultural. Those two are not mutually exclusive.

It’s important to finish that thought. I think it’s important for other museums to get off their high horse and let people come enjoy themselves at a time of day that makes sense for them.

Right. I think photography is a gateway to art because since the introduction of phones with cameras, we’ve gotten to a point where we all have thousands of terrible photos on our phone and we’ve come to learn that it is, in fact, a craft. It takes a point of view, it takes experience. And, ultimately, it takes taste to make an image. What I have found is that when you put people in front of a really great photograph, the first thing they say is, “Oh my God, I could have never done that.” As opposed to people in front of contemporary art, who might dismiss it with, “My five-year-old could have done that.” Of course, their five-year-old couldn’t have, but photography tends to elicit the exact opposite reaction.

Well, it’s great that we opened in Berlin with a number of emerging artists as part of our Nude group show, multidisciplinary artists, and creators who live on that intersection of being a musician and DJ. There’s videos, sculptural work, and of course there’s outstanding photography.

It’s not a pivot. We just wanted a phrase that reflects us better. We’re still doing what we’ve always done, we just finally found a sentence that describes it.

The emphasis is on “contemporary museum,” on rethinking the idea of a museum. But, yes, we do want to put on music. We do want to have concerts. We do want to have DJs spin. We do want to have dance.

We’re very pleased to take the building formerly known as the Tacheles and fill it with art and culture once again. The city granted us the use of the building because they wanted to reinvigorate a very central neighborhood that had grown quiet after C/O Berlin lost its lease up the street. We bring hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, whereas high end galleries don’t, and neither do small artists’ studios.

Right. We definitely skew young. We also target a younger audience. Our average age visitor in Stockholm is 31 years old. We think it’s roughly the same in New York and in Berlin. I think in Shanghai, we may skew even younger. We think our core audience is like 28 to 40. I think once people have kids, they get sucked into that maelstrom.

Right. They’re happy to have an art experience, but they’re not necessarily interested in buying art. I think there’s a dismissal in the art world for a younger audience because the museum people don’t see them that often so they think they’re not serious, and the gallerists don’t really engage with them much because they don’t have the buying power that a gallerist might be interested in. But, they are, in fact, a real art crowd. And it’s a joy that they’re spending their time at Fotografiska.

I’m glad Veronika works. It has instantly become the most popular restaurant in Berlin, especially with the culture crowd. I was actually more nervous about the restaurant than the museum. Berliners know art, but a great dinner in a sexy space with elegant service is still rare. I didn’t want another clever high-concept place with a lot of adjectives around weird dishes, just a really great meal that leaves room for the people you’re with rather than demanding the diners’ attention.

I don’t know, I’m about to totally reinvent Clärchens. Stay tuned. All I can say is the queen is dead. Long live the queen.

Yeah, it’s kind of breaking news; we haven’t told anybody. Stay tuned. Clärchens will reinvent itself throughout 2024. There will be a big moment in September when we do the final reveal. The big news is that it’s the same team that created Veronika, so expect something special.

In the sun. To answer that question seriously, as an entrepreneur, in 2016, 2017, I tried a couple of things; you put your irons in the fire to see which one happens and they all happened. And it turned out to be a lot more work than I can realistically handle. But, I have built a team around me that can take on a lot of that responsibility with me, and I’m grateful for those people because I wouldn’t be able to do it all by myself. And having a global business like Fotografiska or a local institution like Clärchens Ballhaus, that almost every Berliner feels like they emotionally have a stake and an ownership in, requires a very deft hand, something in German we call Fingerspitzengefühl. But I only have ten fingers.

I don’t come from a particularly academic family. However, my parents have always been receptive to art, and when they realized I was interested in this direction, they supported me enthusiastically. My mum studied photography and worked on applied photography for a while. She often traveled to the countryside to take portraits. My dad’s family was invested in the florist trade, creating bouquets and wreaths, and later he went into the antique trade. I was thus exposed to a wide variety of practical objects and artworks as a child. The visual culture of different eras and styles came together in my head, forming a strange mass-like conglomeration. Just to give you an example of these objects: I was very impressed by the domestic altars of peasant culture, which were oftentimes realized as spatial collages displayed in small vaults on walls, decorated with wax figures, paper cutouts and metal threads, or artworks by nuns in convents which were the more ornate, more sublime siblings thereof.

I was amazed by the dedication with which these tiny polion ornaments – ornate floral arrangements made of metallic threads, velvet, silk, pearls, jewels and glass paste – were built around the relics. I think this kind of meticulous work has always been a characteristic of mine, regardless of what material I’ve worked with, be it textiles, paper, or, more recently, glass mosaics. The other determining factor is some kind of ingenuity that I have acquired and which I think is typical of most Hungarians, probably a response or an evolved ability to our more limited possibilities here in Central Eastern Europe, which I have often capitalized on in my own working methods.

I studied ceramics in high school but graduated as a painter from university. In Hungary, art education was very academic and limited at the time I attended these institutions, but now these boundaries are fading. I remember during my first years at university how much I longed to return to the world of forms I had previously explored with ceramics. However, I only gradually dared to incorporate these experiences into my creative process. This was probably also because I had previously approached ceramics purely from a design aspect, creating functional objects. In recent years, I have been drawn to works that enter our living spaces and have a more significant presence. I used to often sleep in my studio after a busy day. I didn’t want to waste the time to head home to sleep. Spending the night among the sculptures was like being part of a pack, one of them, a very comforting feeling.

Connection-seeking formations.

To be honest, I struggle with titles. I’m not a verbal person, and when I have to write something down, or say something, I always feel very vulnerable. I’m scared that I can’t shape it further, that I have to finalize it, and most of the audience will read it for guidance. I’m happy with a title if it’s not some kind of explanation of the work, but rather an extension into another dimension where the story can continue.

For me, one of the most exciting features of mosaics is the grid of lines drawn by tiny, independent pieces placed next to each other. The way in which the organic forms are divided or enclosed by these strict lines. This type of fragmentation is also present in my earlier work; for some reason, I insist on it. I specifically use glass mosaics in my work. I like the way the forms communicate with the viewer through the light shimmering on and bouncing off the glass sheets.

I was interested in taking a perfectly polished, digitally created image, and shattering it to smithereens, taking some of the fragments into my own reality. I wasn’t really interested in finding out anything about it. It was more of an exploration for me.

Hopefully, both, but I’m fundamentally an analogue person. 

When I wrote this, my sculptures were like Siamese twins sharing a common organ. I imagined the two symmetrical sides as two distinct, yet interconnected identities, dissolving into a third entity. I wanted to suggest a kind of connectedness in which our possibilities flow through our bodies and become visible without commitment.

There are no specific characters or subjects. I specifically strive to present identities that anyone can identify with.

After setting up the exhibition and displaying it in Venice, the entire material was displayed at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. Approximately two years were spent on this process. During this period, we a very close relationship with Mónika Zsikla, the curator of the exhibition. This period was full of emotions for us. There was an uplifting sense of achievement, but also some disappointments. It was a remarkable experience and test, both personally and professionally. Overall, I feel that this challenge came at the right moment, which makes me very happy.

In Hungary, the application process takes the form of a curatorial application, which is then evaluated by a professional jury. Mónika approached me with the idea of a joint collaboration, and I said yes without thinking. Our final visual design for the sculptures was already prepared for the competition. We followed the plans very meticulously, and we worked with a lot of people over the two years. It was actually my first project where I let others participate in the construction process, and it was a huge milestone for me. By the time the sculptures were on their way in their gigantic wooden crates, I drifted with the events, letting them flow where they wanted to. Fortunately, looking at the big picture, we’ve had very encouraging feedback, and many new doors have opened for us.

I am not sure whether I can recognize or define something as art but I think that an expression may become art if it shows an alternative perspective on the world. 

I think good art is what stays in your mind.

One three-dimensional thing that comes to mind is an installation of paper streamers that I did for a group show with my classmates in Berlin. I designed the streamers in several striped color rhythms and decorated the gallery’s ceiling. Also a few years back, I did the stage design for a theatre play consisting of window display articles such as fake cherry blossom trees. Besides that I never really sculpted myself… My father and I are in a regular artistic exchange. 

I was drumming throughout my childhood, coping with my hyperactive disposition. As a teenager I spent my afternoons composing music and playing in bands. What struck me about painting is that nobody can watch you at work. So I went to Berlin to become an artist. 

During my 8 years of studying, I experimented with very different ideas. For instance I was painting in a photorealistic style for a couple of years. During the time I was studying in New York, I was painting pillow cases and table cloths. In my last semester at University, I decided that I wanted to do something different and started to paint lines in different colors on white canvases. 

My paintings depict the clash of horizontal and vertical entities. They try to construct a logic within the chaos of decision making. They show the struggle of a structure against its own disintegration.

For the show at Schlachter 151, I developed a new method of filling my canvases. On the bigger works I figured that there is a certain distance between the strokes that is just wide enough: not too crowded, not too blank. I transferred that grid matrix onto all the other paintings, meaning that the smaller the canvas, the fewer the painted strokes. Also, all the colors of the show derive from that big painting in the first room. Basically the whole exhibition consists of fragments of that starting point. Composition-wise, I was looking for a good balance between non-colors, pastel colors, primary colors and black. I wanted to make a harmonious, pretty exhibition. 

With the new method of planning the number of strokes per canvas, I don’t have to make that decision anymore. The painting is finished after the strokes have been sprayed. 

I often hear that what I do has been painted thousands of times… show me. 

I can only speak for myself and I don’t work for experts blessings. I want everyone to like my paintings. 

I think everything is quite perfect in the Berlin art scene. I just don’t think it is my place. 

I much respect the interest of my colleagues in the digital space. My work though is about the real world, the human body, and interactions between those two entities. To me, a blank canvas is artificial enough. When I’m traveling, I use the drawing tool on my phone to capture ideas. I realized how tempting it is to withdraw actions. To me, one advantage of the digital is its ability to simulate: just like Notes may simulate a composition for me. But I am drawn to the un-erasable and factual. I work with the amount of risk that it takes to leave a physical trace. It excites me to interact with my environment physically, just like drumming does. 

Yes, I didn’t literally mean senseless, but functionless, it has no concrete function or practical use. The metaphysics, which dance deals with a lot, has always interested me and is also inexhaustible inspiration – at the same time it was always clear to me: dance is functionless and therefore you don’t need to take it so obsessively seriously. That’s why it’s the constant underdog of the art forms – but I experience exactly that thing about it as very refreshing and pleasant.

I like humor. For me, art can be complicated, defying, questioning the social consensus, cynical, and a challenge to everyone involved. I expect a lot from my audience: openness, trust, participation, courage and above all time.

Beautiful and ugly, good and bad – what fascinates me about art and especially dance is that these supposed opposites are so close together and interchangeable.

The theater offers a space in which other rules of a game can be defined. For me it is one of the safest places of all. The contract between audience and performers is so clear and defined. One party pays and then conventionally sits in the dark for 1-2 hours to watch others perform different simulations of reality. It is totally absurd! It’s different in our outdoor experiences, and it feels necessary for us to break out of the black box every now and then, because it has its own limitations. But the black box remains for me the place where one can define and influence the circumstances the most. In theater, I’m very interested in illusion, illusion with rather meager means as they are still common here: Spots as sun, fog machines and fans. Fantasies can be played out and utopias can be tested.

Well, fears can be extremely good and useful, but also the source of a lot of unnecessary violence. Just the fear of death makes people do the craziest things. It seems to make sense to me to deal with it and to confront fears, so that one learns to deal with them and to transform them into something constructive. The performative space, this Punch and Judy show for adults, at least offers us a good outlet – so we don’t have to run through the city with machine guns.

Etude for Church is a part of a series of etudes that I have been performing with my team in public spaces since 2020. The essence of these etudes is the very literal creation of sound with and through the body as an instrument. I played a lot of Chopin on and off the piano as a child.

The repetition of technical difficulties plays into the definition of an etude- I wanted to represent that musically as well as to ’embody’ it.

Stunt elements usually play a big role in our etudes, we like to use the effects repertoire from stunts for sound production (crashes, collisions, etc).

In this etude, however, things will be a bit quieter, but there will still be stunt performers as musicians. The first idea for Atonal was a human bell. A hybrid of bodies and a 2 ton iron bell. The whole thing has now evolved into a noisy tryptich. So yes here we are certainly working off of certain symbolism and rituals from Catholicism and their relation to physicality. It becomes very straightforward a musical composition for a bell and 5 bodies.

I like experiments. I associate it with a lot of cool things: failure is an integral part of an experiment and therefore risk, but also the possibility to experience something unique or first time. I like it when people really try something, a lot of people don’t do that because they are afraid of the unknown or of failure. Those are people who take art very seriously

That’s exactly what I think about before every new show…