The Permanent Room

In re-thinking the format of the hotel/guest room, artist Ištvan Išt Huzjan took inspiration from the experience of receiving visitors in his studio. Indeed, he felt that there are similarities in the spatial organization of an artist’s studio, a hotel room, and museums. The fruit of these considerations was to combine aspects of each of these in the creation of the Permanent Room, where a selection of Huzjan’s works were on permanent display. The heavy bench you might typically find in the middle of an exhibition space to allow contemplation of the artworks has here been replaced by the bed. Recalling the bourgeois past of the room, that bed is an enormous structure, made of concrete and accommodating up to four guests. At the same time, the bed is low to allow the eye to travel upward and appreciate the vertical endless salon-style hanging of the works. A cloud of art surrounding the bed, the majority of which was produced in the studio that Huzjan previously occupied on the premises.

The art on the walls could change in time while the dreams remain, or else our dreams evolve while we fix Huzjan’s art, reminding us both of our homes and our time away, of our individual pasts, and our influence or incapacity towards today and tomorrow.