Golden Repair at Ludwig Museum: A Thought-Provoking Art Exhibition in Budapest
The Ludwig Museum presents Golden Repair – Fine Connections, a compelling contemporary art exhibition running from October 9, 2025, through February 22, 2026. This exhibition explores healing and repair through art, inviting visitors to reconsider how we approach brokenness in our world.
Event Details
- Exhibition Dates: October 9, 2025 – February 22, 2026
- Location: Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest
- Curators: Rita Dabi-Farkas and Viktória Popovics
- Curatorial Assistant: Dorottya Deák
- Concept: Viktória Popovics
- Special Program – Clothing Swap: October 10, 2025 (10:00 AM) – November 9, 2025 (8:00 PM), free participation
The Kintsugi Philosophy
The exhibition takes its name from the Japanese art of kintsugi, or golden repair, where broken pottery is mended with gold-laced lacquer. Rather than hiding cracks and imperfections, this technique highlights them, transforming damage into something beautiful. The curators apply this philosophy beyond objects to examine how we might heal relationships, societies, and even our planet’s damaged ecosystems.
Themes and Artistic Vision
Golden Repair continues a long-term curatorial project that began in 2023 with the Handle with Care exhibition. The artworks examine fractures at both individual and global scales while suggesting possibilities for collective healing and restoring inner and outer balance. The exhibition challenges visitors to think about repair as an urgent call in our consumer-driven society, emphasizing the finite nature of resources and the importance of mending rather than discarding.
The concept resonates deeply with traditional and non-Western cultures where scars, wounds, and defects carry profound meaning as markers of time, history, and ancestral memory. Here, healing connects with struggles against oppression, colonial legacies, and ongoing decolonization movements, as historical injustices and trauma pass through generations.
Featured Artists
The exhibition showcases work from an impressive international roster of artists, including Yoko Ono, Agnes Denes, Ana Mendieta, and Cecilia Vicuña, alongside Hungarian and regional talents such as Róza El-Hassan, Krisztina Erdei, Zsófia Szemző, and many others. Each artist brings unique perspectives on repair, healing, and transformation.
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Special Programs
Clothing Swap Point: From October 10 through November 9, the museum hosts a clothing exchange station connected to the exhibition’s sustainability themes. This initiative draws attention to sustainable fashion practices and the harmful impacts of fast fashion. Visitors can bring clean, good-condition clothes to swap, and participation is free.
Reflection on Healing
In her opening speech, essayist and art historian Eszter Babarczy shared her personal journey with illness, emphasizing that true healing requires more than medical treatment—it demands hope and paradigm shifts. She connects individual healing with societal repair, suggesting that contemporary art provides space to ask radical questions about how we want to live and whether we can build a gentler, more caring world.
The exhibition poses challenging questions: What are our chances for healing in a toxic world experiencing social burnout? How can we renew ourselves amid economic exploitation, oppressive systems, and environmental destruction? Can what is broken—our health, relationships, society—truly be repaired? What paths does contemporary art offer, and what role can museums play beyond advocating for wellness concepts?
Practical Information
The exhibition is curated by Rita Dabi-Farkas and Viktória Popovics, with curatorial assistance from Dorottya Deák. Located at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest’s Palace of Arts, Golden Repair offers foreign visitors a meaningful cultural experience that transcends language barriers through its universal themes of healing, repair, and hope.
This exhibition provides more than visual stimulation—it invites contemplation about our relationship with brokenness, whether in objects, relationships, or social systems, and challenges us to embrace the gentle revolution of care over disposal.