Márk Fridvalszki’s show Once Upon a Time, Maybe It Never Happened revives the peculiar mood of late 20th-century Central and Eastern European public spaces and homes. Everyday backdrops of the past reassemble as collages, taking on new meanings where personal memories intertwine with the era’s contradictory historical experiences. The works feel familiar—perhaps because we’ve all encountered that odd, tender yet cool atmosphere that shaped the shared visual world of generations raised under socialism.
The exhibition runs from Friday, December 19, 2025, to Tuesday, February 3, 2026, across the venue’s lower and upper levels. It invites viewers to wander through layered fragments, where the banal becomes symbolic and nostalgia rubs against disillusionment. Fridvalszki isn’t reenacting history so much as unsettling it—porous surfaces, borrowed textures, and staged domestic relics turn memory into a living set, full of gaps and echoes.
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Cover image: Márk Fridvalszki, Take My Hand.
