Ludlow 38’s film series will start with Miklós Erhardt’s documentary Havanna, which was conceived by the artist as a social research project in a housing complex in the suburbs of Budapest. During the course of May 2006, Erhardt rented a shopfront space on the ground floor of a high-rise building and started renovating it. The resulting film documents the artist experiencing the potential of his own interventions in a sensitive social setting. By including the proposals of neighbors and passersby for intermediate use of the space, Erhardt’s film is an attempt to shed new light on a community suffering from prejudices and imposed stereotypes, while the work analyses the construction of a social reality in post-communist Hungary through the portrayal of an “Advice Seeking Office”. At the same time Havanna also addresses issues of artistic failure and success, promise and lost opportunity…
Miklós Erhardt was born in 1966; he lives and works in Budapest. The Balassi Publishing House published his translation of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle for the first time in Hungarian in 2006. Erhardt latest work Ship of Fools (2008), produced in collaboration with Little Warsaw, was on view at Manifesta 7, Rovereto.
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