Eszter Szakács is a curator and researcher. She has recently been appointed the 2025 Curator of the Guest Programme of the 41st EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art. Szakács is a Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis of the University of Amsterdam, where she is taking part in the project IMAGINART—Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation. Together with Naeem Mohaiemen, Szakács co-edited Solidarity Must Be Defended, the recently-published anthology of visual arts projects exploring solidarity, realized and failed, during the Cold War. In 2023, she curated the research-cum-solo exhibition Dóra Maurer–SUMUS–We Are Together at de Appel in Amsterdam. Szakács was part of the curatorial team of the grassroots art initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest, who were recipients of the Goethe Medal award (2023) and lumbung members and participants at documenta 15 (2022). Szakács was also a curatorial team member in OFF-Biennale’s second (2017) and third edition (2021), and a member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance team that collectively curated the Kyiv Biennial in 2021.
Between 2011 and 2020, she worked as curator and editor at tranzit/hu in Budapest—part of the East-Central European independent network tranzit/org—where, among others, she curated the Budapest premier of Naeem Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral (2018), co-curated the exhibition Imagining Conceptual Art: László Beke’s 1971 Collection in an International Context (tranzitdisplay, Prague, 2017), co-edited the online international journal Mezosfera (2016–2020). She also co-edited the collaborative Curatorial Dictionary (2012–2018), which was featured in the ICI traveling exhibition Publishing Against the Grain (2017–2023), and is a participating curator in Notes for Tomorrow.
