Panmetallurgia

Just like smelting iron ore, the recently crisis-ridden iconic steel plant Dunai Vasmű – during its exactly seventy-year operation – could also smelt into itself the peculiar economic and political history of Hungary, from socialist industrialization through Post-Fordism to the recent reindustrialisation program, from state socialist ideology through genuinely emancipatory modernist visions to authoritarian neoliberalism, from Soviet geopolitics through “Eastern Opening” to the Russo-Ukrainian War. The exhibition explores the country’s haunting past and various future-visions through the state of Hungary’s largest steel plant in the middle of a financial and identity crisis, building on the toolbar of “Industrial Gothic” and theories of new materialism.