POWER LINES

Set within a former transformer station in Budapest — once built to power the city’s industrial expansion and now a place of cultural production — the exhibition POWER LINES brings works from the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection into dialogue with artistic positions from Hungary and across Central and Eastern Europe. The show explores how infrastructures of industry, energy, labour, and mobility continue to shape living conditions and environments.

POWER LINES reflects on the transformations that have reshaped the Budapest region over recent decades. Industrial production, logistical networks, and technological systems have generated opportunities, defined aesthetics, and created new forms of mobility. At the same time, they have embedded territories and communities within complex infrastructures of dependence.

Over 30 participating artists trace the routes through which people, materials, energies, and various infrastructures circulate across Central and Eastern Europe. Their works examine themes such as labour migration and working conditions, administrative systems, and the spatial logics of modernist planning — revealing how industrial corridors and regulatory frameworks shape both individual trajectories and collective realities.

At the same time, the exhibition foregrounds the material consequences of these processes. Landscapes altered by extraction, changing climates, and expanding infrastructure appear alongside reflections on (factory) architecture and modernist design, whose promises of rational order and progress now encounter social and environmental strain.

Presented within Merlin Theater POWER LINES invites visitors to consider how systems of energy, industry, labour, and movement remain deeply entangled with cultural and ecological environments. As part of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection’s international exhibition program, the project connects global industrial contexts with artistic perspectives emerging from the Budapest region.

Curated by Krisztián Gábor Török for the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection in cooperation with Art is Business.

Participating artists:

Mustafah Abdulaziz, John M. Armleder, Jakub Choma, Dávid Demjanovič & Jarmila Mitríková, Marta Dyachenko, Ágnes Eperjesi, Sylvie Fleury, Noémie Goudal, David Hockney, Doruntina Kastrati, Stefan Knauf, Paul Kolling, Katalin Kortmann–Járay & Karina Mendreczky, Diana Lelonek, Robert Longo, Áron Lődi, Elisa Manig, Dániel Máté, Ilona Németh, Benedikt Partenheimer, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Agnieszka Polska, Charlotte Posenenske, Randomroutines, Moritz Riesenbeck, Peter Roehr, Julika Rudelius, Șerban Savu, Oskar Schlemmer, Selma Selman, Santiago Sierra, Monika Sosnowska, Susanne Stövhase, Rita Süveges, Sung Tieu, Claudia Wieser, Ben Willikens, Yin Xiuzhen

Venue and opening hours:

Merlin Theater, 4 Gerlóczy Street, 1052 Budapest – Entrance via City Hall Park
Open Wednesday – Sunday, 12am – 6pm
Admission free