The Hungarian Pavilion brings together three distinctive artistic practices by Ildy Tihanyi, Fruzsina Nagy and Edit Szűcs, whose works exist at the intersection of costume, fashion, performance and visual art. Their shared relevance to the theme of the Tbilisi Biennale lies not simply in their professional engagement with costume and fashion, but in the way they have each developed an autonomous artistic language through these media.
In their work, costume is liberated from its traditional supporting role. It no longer serves merely to define a character or illustrate a theatrical world; instead, it becomes an active, independent agent of performance. Across the three projects presented here, the dressed body is transformed into a site of experimentation, storytelling, identity construction and visual confrontation. The costume may function as sculpture, mask, technological interface, second skin or moving image, but in each case it fundamentally determines the dramaturgy of the work.
Although their approaches are markedly different, all three artists create performances that blur the boundaries between fashion show, theatre and visual installation. Tihanyi extends costume into hybrid physical and digital realities through light, sound and 3D technologies; Nagy radically alters the body through experimental materials and technology, scale, humour and visual excess; while Szűcs investigates costume and mask as instruments through which identity can be constructed, concealed, liberated or constrained.
What unites these practices is a continuous testing of boundaries: between body and object, fashion and theatre, functionality and autonomy, reality and constructed identity. In these works, costume does not accompany the performance. Costume generates the performance, and ultimately becomes its protagonist.
Curator Fruzsina Nagy
Participants Edit Szűcs, Fruzsina Nagy, Ildy Tihanyi
