
Emplotment
Curated by Fruzsina Feigl, Borbála Kálmán, and Katalin Timár
Ludwig Muźeum, Budapest
13 May – 28 August 2022
The guiding principle of the exhibition is the adaptation of both material and personal sources of trauma by means of the tools of visual art and a novel analysis of their performative representation. We examine how artists’ participation in these processes has changed over the last two to three decades, and what new approaches and perspectives have emerged in different artistic practices. The exhibition is primarily conceived as a platform that, instead of showing works that seek to represent traumatic experiences and tragic events, focuses on creative processes that use art as a potential active tool for processing trauma.
The duality of the exhibition’s English and Hungarian titles reflects the complexity inherent in the topic of trauma. The term emploitment has been transferred from narratology to historiography and it refers to the fact that when a historian arranges events of importance to him or her into a narrative sequence in order to ‘narrate’ a particular historical period, this selection and arrangement is determined more by the narrative rules of storytelling than by historiography’s endeavour for objectivity. Discrete events must be ‘emplotted’ in order to take narrative form. In the context of the exhibition, the two terms (előhívás and emplotment) complement each other as they refer to two interdependent aspects of trauma processing.
The study of the relationship between art and trauma has a long history, which has only grown stronger with the spread of trauma research. In the last two decades, however, a number of new methods and aspects have come to the fore. The various branches of trauma studies as well as artistic trauma research (in Hungary, mainly related to the Holocaust) are accompanied by extensive literature and a myriad of approaches. For the above reasons, we have consciously tried to avoid a thematic approach to the sources of trauma, the analysis of their psychological or art-therapeutic narrative, or the exploration of their historical context, and consequently, we do not return to the Holocaust. As our focus is explicitly on the recent past, the exhibition emphasises the gravity and role of positions outlined through artistic practices.
The exhibition makes the notion of trauma permeable in its layered interpretations and intensities, to make room for often less visible but deeply rooted issues. Accordingly, some less obvious sources of trauma are also included in the exhibition, emphasising the everyday aspects of trauma.

Selma Selman, Installation view of Emplotment, Curated by Fruzsina Feigl, Borbála Kálmán, Katalin Timár, Ludwig Muźeum, Budapest, 2022
Photo by József Rosta
The focus of I Will Buy My Freedom When is the institution of forced marriage, which still exists today in many Roma communities around the world, based on a long history of customary law. According to tradition, girls, often underage, are sold by their parents to the groom’s family, which is a significant source of income. The tradition also runs in the artist’s own family, where her mother was married off as a child. For five years, Selman filmed her family’s daily life, and the resulting video shows her efforts to discover and define the value of her life and the price of her freedom. That amount is $11,166. In her ongoing project, Selman is selling her artworks, clothes and hair to buy her freedom. Her goal is to free herself and her family from the burden of tradition and to help future generations achieve collective self-liberation.
Selman has been an important catalyst in reducing discrimination against women in her local community, and in 2017 she set up a foundation to support the further education of Roma children in Bihać through scholarships. A key part of the programme, which mainly targets girls, is to help families and end the practice of early marriage to give children the opportunity to continue their education.