Kontrapunk Collective
Kontrapunkt Collective is an international creative group founded in 2022 by Rita Besnyői, Vica Gábor, Lieta Marziali, and Luca Sági. As four creators with different backgrounds and perspectives, we work together to explore the intersection of individual and collaborative practice through the development of concepts which include exhibitions projects, installation and documentation processes, and audience involvement.
KONTRAPUNKT No. 3- I Are Here 2025
As Kontrapunkt Collective we wish to explore the intersection between individual and collective practice. As individuals, we already incorporate within ourselves a multitude of voices which, in Kontrapunkt, are further blended into a superstructure that works in harmony, combining while still highlighting our individual characteristics. Our projects are catalysts for these investigations: they are experiments that drive our wish to better understand the nature of collaboration and, through that, of our own selves, both as people and as practitioners.
In this project we aimed to explore the essence of the collective by constructing a shared identity through which to make the work – a Muse, an alter-ego, a personification of Kontrapunkt, if you wish. Through the soul, the eyes, the brain and the hands of this Muse, we explored how our strengths and weaknesses as well as the masks that we put on are all building blocks of our collective, and also how, through Kontrapunkt, we exist as and advocate for something bigger than ourselves. This exhibition is the Muse’s first solo show.
Before bringing it to the vault we did not allow each other to see the work. Collectivity is something precious, enough to be stored in a safe but also enough that it needs to be seen and shared. And it is together with all of you visitors that we share our anticipation, curiosity and reactions.
KONTRAPUNKT COLLECTIVE: WHO ARE YOU?
MUSE: I are all of you, but I am also all of me. I are the essence of your knowledge, personality, thoughts and experiences. But I are my own person too. A child you, free from expectations, driven by play and intuition. And a wise you, free from pretence, driven by the here and now.
KC: WHAT ARE YOU?
M: I are like a pen name: the chance for you to find another perspective, and to experience and trust creative freedom. I are the you as you learn to transform yourselves, to become stronger, to live more consciously. I are the muse that inspires you to surrender to yourselves and the creator that energises you to take action through yourselves.
KC: WHY ARE YOU?
M: I are so that you can be filled with trust in the creative process. I are so you are not pressured by deadlines, or the need for appreciation, or your own hyper-critical voices. I are so that you can be truly selective about what you identify with and what brings you joy and so that you can accept the results completely and unconditionally. I are so that you can find your courage, and also your pride.
KC: WHEN ARE YOU?
M: Maybe I have been only for a few stolen hours during this process. But what if I could be always?
KC: WHERE ARE YOU?
M: I are in all of you who created me and in all of you who are coming to share in my work. You are here. I – ARE – HERE.
Exhibition images
A-Galerii, Tallinn
2025
KONTRAPUNKT No. 2 - PERMISSION TO SPEAK 2023
Since completing our first Kontrapunkt exhibition just over a year ago, the biggest revelation to us was how, despite not all being close as people beforehand, we had started experiencing the benefit (and the efficiency!) of shared trust and non-hierarchical decision-making processes – what we soon came to call the Kontrapunkt Method. As we reflected on its possibilities as a model for better living in the world, we knew we had to keep going because there was so much more that we could experiment with and learn. And not just among ourselves. The audience is, in fact, just as important in the Kontrapunkt Method, not simply as viewers but active participants
in our collective gesture of art-making.
The premise for this new Kontrapunkt project is simple enough: four voices, four very personal inspirations, four responses from each voice. The implications are however more complex. The permission mentioned in our title is, very importantly, taken as well as granted. It is taken by each of us in our individual choice of inspiration and also in our interpretation not only of that but
of all the others’ choices. It is granted in our trust in the others to find their own connections with each of our choices. Observing and reflecting on the development of this give-and-take equilibrium has been the core of this project.
The etymology of the word permission contains two very important concepts for Kontrapunkt – those of “forward” and of “exchange”. What is exchanged and what is moving forward is not just our voice, but our very understanding of ourselves, as well as of others. Our understanding of our own choices and of our own responses, our own life rhythms, our own working habits, our
own processes. Developing such an intimate relation with others means developing a more intimate relation with ourselves. If we started by thinking of “art as a verb”, we are now also reflecting on “sharing as a method”.
The sharing does not stop at our close circle but has to extend completely to the audience. It is together with the audience that our collectivity is fully actualized. With them, we all move forward once again, as we strive to understand each other through another level, another layer, of sharing where they too have to take and grant their own permission to speak. In this sense, the
pieces that are made through this process are not important as a final product but as a challenge to understand that what is “mine” is in fact “ours” and then becomes “everybody’s”.
It is the dialogue and not the pieces that is the “precious product” here. We take our own permission to talk and we grant it to others and, as in polyphonic singing, individual melodies are not dispersed or diluted into the voice of the choir and instead become more powerful and self-aware as the sharing moves forward. But their potential is at its fullest when they operate in
their context and belong, united, to their collectivity.
Exhibition Publication: Kontapunkt NO2- Permission to Speak
Colour printing
165 x 235 mm
91 pages
Perfect bound,
Unique softcovers,
2024
Permission To Speak is the first full publication from Kontrapunkt Collective, formed of four international artists working in the field of jewellery and exploring the intersection between individual and collective practice. The collective uses writing, conversation events and other forms of documentation alongside exhibition projects to reflect on the actual process of working collectively, how their collective projects are empowered by the fusion of individual strengths, and in turn how their individual practices are empowered by the collaborative effort.
Born as a catalogue document for their second eponymous project, the book describes the exercise used as an experiment to catalyse the group’s research goals. It then extends its scope into elucidating aspects of collectivity in the artistic field, starting from more essential elements such as choice, respect and trust, to investigating the participatory role of the audience and of the exhibition space in the collective act. Permission To Speak is therefore not just a catalogue, nor just a book, nor just a research document. Like Kontrapunkt, it is a collective of the many possible voices of artistic research.
Contributors: Rita Besnyői, Vica Gábor, Lieta Marziali, Luca Sági
*** COVER IMAGE MAY VARY ***
You can buy our catalogue online here, or at Good Press, 32 St Andrews Street
Glasgow, G1 5PD
KONTRAPUNKT No. 1 -- 2022
As a word, art is perceived as product, a noun, an object. In English, Hungarian, German and
Italian there is no verb for “art”, instead concentrating on made results rather than the process of
doing it. And yet it is in the thinking and the doing that individual art practices strive to create
harmonies out of internal voices and challenges – emotional, material, technical, personal,
political – and often also crossing disciplines.
In a group exhibition, there is the additional challenge of making all these already complex
harmonies work together in a new superstructure, testing differences to seek common ground,
accepting weaknesses to create strength, giving up control to enhance cooperation. Kontrapunkt
wants to show artists in their liminal thinking and doing as they interrogate their boundaries, as
they explore and exploit imbalance, as they deconstruct in order to construct, as they struggle
through chaos in order to seek a new equilibrium.
But Kontrapunkt wishes also to show that if one single voice contains already the depth of a full
choir, when a group of distinct voices comes together, the energy of their polyphony has the
power to multiply, reverberate and resonate, like an irregular crystal under the sun, and to
promote a model of living in the world of independent interdependence where the complex
potential of the intersecting beams is always stronger than that of its individual rays.
Lieta Marziali
Find out more about this exhibition in our interview with the artists here.
