BudapestZIN: Trafó House contemporary art

Trafó: The Salt and Pepper of contemporary Art

12:53 PMZannnie

There is a tradition reaching back decades in Western Europe of settling artistic centers and artistic institutions in empty industrial buildings. The Trafó House of Contemporary Arts opened in 1998 as the first of this kind in Hungary.

Trafó is an institution, a building, a place, a medium, vibrating, an intellectual adventure, risk, possibility. A house which belongs to the contemporary arts. A place, where life speaks about dance, theater, visual arts, literature, music. A theater, which has no company, and where the viewer is co-equal with the created-an opportunity, as well as the necessity to relate in a creative way. A place where emotion is allowed more space than the usual alongside abstraction. A place, through which we can look out into the world.

The Trafó building, once the electrical transformer station for south Pest, was built in 1909 as a work in the industrial turn-of-the-century style. It was put to cultural use by a French anarchist artistic group at the beginning of the 90's, who discovered the building, abandoned for more than forty years. Performances and concerts followed one another for a summer, and for a time it functioned as a dedicated building. The Budapest City Council bought the building with leftover funds from the unrealized World Expo, so that the legal successor to the legendary Young Artists' Club (FMK), formerly on Andrassy út, could convert it into n suitable, multifunctional, well equipped contemporary arts center appropriate to the current day. The Trafó House of Contemporary Arts opened its gates during the 1998 Budapest Spring Festival with a piece by Yvette Bozsik.

Contact

Trafó - House of Contemporary Arts
1094 Budapest, Liliom u. 41.

Telephone numbers

(+36-1) 215 1600 | Ticket Office
(Mon-Fri 2-8 pm, Sat-Sun 5-8 pm)