Body Image Falling
Presented at Gallery Rudolfinum, Prague
2026
Presented at Gallery Rudolfinum, Prague
2026
These sculptures are replicas of a replica of a colonial-era globe found in Viktor Orban’s study. The globe and its presence in the Hungarian ex-PM’s office reveal the underlying aesthetics and aspirations of a biopolitical agenda that was worked into legislation during his rule. On the one hand, it is through this analogy that the piece also introduces contemporary items that represent similar “imperial” ambitions – forms of the networked AI-powered CCTV cameras, or the fiber optic network cables that are like nerves connecting legislation and command, human and machine.
Doomcore
Presented at Studio Hanniball, Berlin and AQB, Budapest
2025-26
Presented at Studio Hanniball, Berlin and AQB, Budapest
2025-26
Doomcore emerged in the early 1990s as a subgenre of hardcore techno, characterized by slow, heavy, and industrial beats, as well as an apocalyptic aesthetic. Compared to the more upbeat or euphoric strains of rave music, which represent ideals of ecstasy, unity, and a utopia of love against the Neoliberal status quo, doomcore embraced paranoia, isolation, and breakdown. Doomcore was the sound of a generation that no longer believed in progress, only in entropy. A sonic reaction to the trauma of transition and the disillusionment of the post-Cold War world, a paranoid mirror of the ‘90s political unconscious. Doomcore, as a prophetic aesthetic of industrial and ideological decay, is materialized here as an assemblage of discarded CD cases turned into reliefs and a CD tower holding a singular fossil-like CD.
Lunch Break
Presented at Pragovka Gallery, Prague
2025
Presented at Pragovka Gallery, Prague
2025
This collaborative installation, created together with Víctor Santamarina, addresses contemporary forms of labor and survival. Titled Lunch Break, the installation reworks domestic furniture pieces, a recipe and discarded construction materials into a moment of rest as it reflects on the fragile balance between exhaustion and dignity.
Ergocide
Presented at Torula, Győr
2025
As a byproduct of political capitalism, labor is deskilled and outsourced. The economy is being gigified, and laborers are being replaced by algorithms and fast-moving, motorised tools. This is the tendency best described as ‘ergocide’, the quantified and optimised systemic wiping out of human labor not through direct violence but through automation, digitisation, and economic abstraction across all sectors.
Presented at Torula, Győr
2025
As a byproduct of political capitalism, labor is deskilled and outsourced. The economy is being gigified, and laborers are being replaced by algorithms and fast-moving, motorised tools. This is the tendency best described as ‘ergocide’, the quantified and optimised systemic wiping out of human labor not through direct violence but through automation, digitisation, and economic abstraction across all sectors.
Presented in Torula, a former yeast factory converted into a cultural space, the installation references Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione, a traditionally modernist approach to make furniture production widely accessible through simple designs relying on elementary woodworking techniques. In Ergocide, this Mari-esque, ‘open-source’ approach is reappropriated into a skeleton-like chair on which a glitchy, 9-fingered cast-aluminium hand in a standard-issue military glove is placed.
Xx63
Premiered at Julidans Festival, Amsterdam
2025
In Xx-63 - the second performance of Trevoga Collective - the body is not a sacred place but an abandoned shopping mall: crammed with the remnants of consumer culture, synthetic chemicals, and sexually charged images. Here, fear is not an abstraction, but a physical state - something that crawls, wriggles, and bites. The performers scratch at the shiny surfaces of urban hyperreality and lay bare its disturbing undercurrents. From the distorted clichés and symbols, a mirror of a grotesque and confused present emerges.
Premiered at Julidans Festival, Amsterdam
2025
In Xx-63 - the second performance of Trevoga Collective - the body is not a sacred place but an abandoned shopping mall: crammed with the remnants of consumer culture, synthetic chemicals, and sexually charged images. Here, fear is not an abstraction, but a physical state - something that crawls, wriggles, and bites. The performers scratch at the shiny surfaces of urban hyperreality and lay bare its disturbing undercurrents. From the distorted clichés and symbols, a mirror of a grotesque and confused present emerges.
artistic direction and choreography Neda Ruzheva | dramaturgy Nikola Stoyanov | performers Ana Szopa, Ming Jou Chen, Nazar Rakhmanov | set design Alagya Aron Lodi & Szilvia Bolla
| light design Erik van de Wijdeven | music Manolis Elijah Sueuga | costumes David Siepman | styling Michalina Górnik | prosthetics Zoia Atkinson
2025
Commissioned by Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest
2025
Titled 2025, Alagya’s project for the 2025 edition of NEXTFEST at Trafó House of Contemporary Arts was inspired by the conditions and contradictions of the Hungarian public sphere. The artist duo created a series of text-based artworks placed on Trafó’s facades that contained statements seeking to bring forward narratives of solidarity, imagination, and hope at times of impending hopelessness.
Commissioned by Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest
2025
Titled 2025, Alagya’s project for the 2025 edition of NEXTFEST at Trafó House of Contemporary Arts was inspired by the conditions and contradictions of the Hungarian public sphere. The artist duo created a series of text-based artworks placed on Trafó’s facades that contained statements seeking to bring forward narratives of solidarity, imagination, and hope at times of impending hopelessness.
Undead
Produced at BANSKÁ ST A NICA Contemporary, Banská Štiavnica, 2024
Produced at BANSKÁ ST A NICA Contemporary, Banská Štiavnica, 2024
A series of prints made during a printmaking residency, combining relief printing from laser-engraved blocks with Xerox transfers from photographs and hand-drawn graphite details.
Metallurgia
Ongoing project since 2022. Over the years, Metallurgia has been presented in various shapes and forms by Sandberg Insitute, Amsterdam; 1111 Gallery, Budapest; Irokez Collection; Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, Debrecen; Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, and Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana.
Over its seventy years of operation, Hungary’s iconic steelplant, Dunai Vasmű, has borne witness to the country’sturbulent history. Its factory walls carry layer upon layer of pastsystems and ideologies from the socialist industrialisation and Soviet geopolitical ambitions of the Cold War era, the Post-Fordist restructuring of the late twentieth century and theemancipatory modernist visions that persisted throughout,to the authoritarian neoliberalism of recent reindustrialisation programs. Amidst the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine,the ongoing war between the Russian and Ukrainian owners of the factory peaked as well. As production halted, due to the lack of management, resources and clientele, it was only through the workers’ unpaid labour that the blast furnace kept running, as shutting it down would have resulted in permanent damage to the machinery. Though eventually bought by the British-Indian Liberty Steel, metal production has never taken off again. In 2025, the plant was ultimately closed down and some 2,500 workers were laid off. The factory remains a seemingly quiet site of heavy industry, producing nothing else but the haunting embodiment of geopolitical conflicts and the local histories it carries.
Ongoing project since 2022. Over the years, Metallurgia has been presented in various shapes and forms by Sandberg Insitute, Amsterdam; 1111 Gallery, Budapest; Irokez Collection; Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, Debrecen; Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, and Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana.
Over its seventy years of operation, Hungary’s iconic steelplant, Dunai Vasmű, has borne witness to the country’sturbulent history. Its factory walls carry layer upon layer of pastsystems and ideologies from the socialist industrialisation and Soviet geopolitical ambitions of the Cold War era, the Post-Fordist restructuring of the late twentieth century and theemancipatory modernist visions that persisted throughout,to the authoritarian neoliberalism of recent reindustrialisation programs. Amidst the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine,the ongoing war between the Russian and Ukrainian owners of the factory peaked as well. As production halted, due to the lack of management, resources and clientele, it was only through the workers’ unpaid labour that the blast furnace kept running, as shutting it down would have resulted in permanent damage to the machinery. Though eventually bought by the British-Indian Liberty Steel, metal production has never taken off again. In 2025, the plant was ultimately closed down and some 2,500 workers were laid off. The factory remains a seemingly quiet site of heavy industry, producing nothing else but the haunting embodiment of geopolitical conflicts and the local histories it carries.
The paradox of a factory operating continuously without producing anything became the starting point of Áron Lődi’s Metallurgia (2022–2024). Through installation, sculptureand writing, he reimagines the tradition of industrial gothic,a genre that emerged alongside the Industrial Revolution, using accessible language to articulate the exploitation and give voice to the first stirrings of anti-capitalist thought. At first glance, a steel plant seems an unlikely Gothic site, yet the representation of factories in Gothic literature is as old as industrial capitalism itself. Drawing on theories of Gothic Marxism, which has its roots in Marx’s use of Gothic metaphors, as well as New Materialism, the artist uncovers the unfinished histories and unrealised futures still trapped within the factory’s halls.
By examining its contradictory temporalities and identities amid the financial and identity crisis of Dunai Vasmű alongside the stories of its workers and the organisation of their labour union, Lődi challenges dominant dystopian narratives in order to reveal the political potential they still hold. Through the interweaving of fictional and factual narratives and the combination of fabricated and found elements, he creates visual stories with many layers and clues that address individual and collective agency in the face of today’s political and economic realities. These realities range from Hungary’s reindustrialisation, marked by a surge of battery factories and limited workers’ rights, to the emergence of surveillance technologies and algorithmic authoritarianism. His work persists beneath the surface of history, examining how the past haunts the present and how certain narratives might yet be reclaimed.
Text written by Ajda Ana Kocutar and Lara Mejač.
Alagya
Alagya is the duo practice of Szilvia Bolla and Aron Lodi with a focus on collaborative work through writing, performance, and installations. Their work has been presented by Jedna Dva Tri Gallery, Prague; A Promise of Kneropy, Bratislava; Ultrastudio, Pescara; Vunu Gallery, Kosice; Loods6, Amsterdam; and Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest. Their past collaborators include Teo Ala-Ruona, Boris Ondreicka, the Last Oblivion artist duo, Valentina Várhelyi, Taka Kono, and the Trevoga collective.
Alagya constructs new possible forms of literacy around the capitalocene through an interplay between multidisciplinary collaborations, material explorations and writing.
Alagya is the duo practice of Szilvia Bolla and Aron Lodi with a focus on collaborative work through writing, performance, and installations. Their work has been presented by Jedna Dva Tri Gallery, Prague; A Promise of Kneropy, Bratislava; Ultrastudio, Pescara; Vunu Gallery, Kosice; Loods6, Amsterdam; and Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest. Their past collaborators include Teo Ala-Ruona, Boris Ondreicka, the Last Oblivion artist duo, Valentina Várhelyi, Taka Kono, and the Trevoga collective.
Alagya constructs new possible forms of literacy around the capitalocene through an interplay between multidisciplinary collaborations, material explorations and writing.
Based on both speculation and fact, the project forges pre-/ reimaginations of technofossils as material traces of the capitalocene - the age when (pseudo-) commodity appears as a species that desires chaos and necrotizes the entire planet. Capital is the Sixth Extinction personified, and technoculture becomes both its birth and burial in the shape of its own materiality. However, instead of interpreting fossils as ghostly dead matter, the artists examine them as dynamic entities through the scope of new materialist vitalism. Their works are material hybrids, body machines that are inhabitants / refugees / natives / critters / creatures / survivors. These technofossils reveal that the body itself is only human by virtue of technology. The human hand is human because of what it makes, not of what it is. This is the organic condition of technological life.
Thus, the project Alagya embraces collectivity, hybrid materiality, and technology to learn about what it means and how it feels to be a dweller of a world in which matter, tool, human, and information are irrevocably intertwined.
