The exhibition Flotilla – Unmarked Marker explores the visual traces left on the abandoned buildings of the Petofi (Petőfi) Barracks at Budapest Gallery. Once the base of the Home Defense (Honvéd) River Flotilla from 1945 to 2001, the site still bears layered graffiti and inscriptions that hold both military discipline and urban freedom in the same breath.
From barracks walls to gallery walls
Artist Robert (Róbert) Nunkovics salvages pyrography panels from the former club room, presenting burned-wood images of the flotilla’s ships and watery scenes that feel both archival and alive. These tactile pieces pull the naval past out of storage and into the present, with a rough-hewn intimacy that painting can’t fake.
Voices from the river force
Interviews and videos weave in the soldiers’ memories—routine, rumor, river fog, and the quiet choreography of boats along the Danube—turning the hall into a listening post. The result is a double exposure of Budapest: a military footprint ghosting through a city that kept writing on its own walls. The exhibition runs through May 3.
(Lead image: Budapest Gallery)
