Bipolar

Bipolar was initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation to support German-Hungarian cooperative projects. Following a call for proposals, a German-Hungarian jury reviewed all 144 submitted applications and recommended funding to 32 cooperative projects in the fields of music, theatre, art, literature, cultural history and cultural education. Approximately 300 artists were involved in over 100 events and more than a dozen publications documented the quality of the completed projects. The results of the individual projects were presented in ten German cities (including Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne and Stuttgart) and sixteen Hungarian cities (e.g., Budapest, Szeged, Kecskemét, Kaposvár, Gyõr, Pécs and Szombathely) in 2006/2007. Thanks to the efforts of Bipolar, artists, curators, scholars, pedagogues and cultural agents from both countries were able to establish a unique network which will exist long after the Bipolar projects end. The Federal Cultural Foundation allocated a total of 3 million euro to the German-Hungarian Cultural Projects for a three-year period (2005-2007).

Some outstanding examples of these German-Hungarian Cultural Projects include the historic media-art exhibition "Kempelen - Man in the Machine" in the Budapest Art Museum and the ZKM | Karlsruhe, a new production by the enfant terrible in the Hungarian theatre scene Viktor Bodó at the Berlin HAU, the close analysis of selected works by the playwright Heiner Müller, who very few Hungarians had heard of prior to this project, and the interdisciplinary collaboration between the choreographer Pál Frenák and the composer Helmut Oehring in Munich. In addition to musical productions based on sound visualisation and theatre courses for young people, the Bipolar programme focused heavily on how people deal with history and memory. The artist Gunter Demnig addressed this theme in his work "Stumbling Blocks", the first of which he laid in the streets of Budapest.
At its closing ceremony at the Berlin Academy of the Arts in November 2007, Bipolar presented the world premieres of three young composers whose pieces pay tribute to the Hungarian composter György Ligeti (1923-2006).