A Dream on Lucids

The pseudo–group exhibition by Tamás Kaszás, Krisztián Kristóf, and The Randomroutines presents works from both artists’ individual oeuvres while centring around their collaborative, grand-scale, multi-channel video and sound installation. A Dream on Lucids (2016–23) is an ongoing project authored by Kaszás and Kristóf’s collective, TheRandomroutines, and occupies the entirety of the upper floor of the Edith-Russ-Haus. The complex narrative of the work is inspired by, and celebrates, a special journey undertaken decades ago—an experiment in collective living and thinking and in making art from everything and about everything, fuelled by the question, “Why can’t we live the way we want to?”

The script is a confabulation on the fictional sect of Lucids, whose members practice techniques of semi-sleepwalking in their mutually shared, conscious dreams. Within these dreams, they create a new space for collective action and respond to fabricated events as though they had taken place in reality. The flow of audio narration is accompanied by video fragments, slide collages, and archival footage, creating a dreamy visual landscape that is entirely captivating and borderline psychedelic in effect.

The second level of the exhibition is designed like a museum of ethnology that presents Kaszás’s and Kristóf’s art objects, sculptures, light installations, and paintings as if they belong to the curious tribe of the Lucids. Through the carefully orchestrated installations we learn about the Lucids’ lives, hopes, practices, and knowledges as they try to lure us into imagining the future in a radically different way.

Outside, in front of the house, the show is accompanied by a special public sculpture by The Randomroutines titled Saveable People, which incorporates seating, a plant exchange station, and figures rendered from painted steel rebar. The main character—a mother of twins—links closely to local history, as the offices of the Edith-Russ-Haus served as a birth house until the beginning of the twentieth century.

Curated by Edit Molnár and Marcel Schwierin