Aron Lodi
Info about the residency
15. August 2025 - 31. October 2025MeetFactory: Prague, Czech Republic
About the artist
Aron Lodi (b. 1996, HU) lives and works in The Hague. He holds an MFA from the Dirty Art Department from Sandberg Institute (2023). His works have been featured in various international group shows, including Torula (Győr), Loods6 (Amsterdam), Promise of Kneropy (Bratislava), Jedna Dva Tri Gallery (Prague), LAM (Budapest), and Vunu Gallery (Kosice). Lodi works across a wide range of disciplines from sculpture, image-making, and writing to publishing and curatorial collaborations. His practice embraces the coalescence of horror stories and emancipatory possibilities to create multi-layered narratives about individual and collective agency in the face of contemporary crises.About the project
Lodi's project Haunted Datasets and Post-Sovereign Bodies (working title) focuses on the recent constitutional amendment in Hungary that bans public gatherings by LGBTQ+ communities and enables the use of emerging surveillance technologies to identify attendees and enforce the new law. This crackdown on human rights is not merely another effort to subjugate queer people, but can also be understood as part of a series of long-ongoing tactics and policy changes that secure the technocratic power of the state. It dialogues with the rise of platform fascism and transnational algorithmic authoritarianism. Within the framework of the residency, Lodi's goal is to map out the Hungarian state's surveillance and safety policies whose introductions were often disguised as measures against immigration, the political influence of the EU, George Soros, or other "foreign agents". Imperial boomerang in full swing. It is through this lens, that Lodi will observe and deconstruct Hungary's political opacity and shifting position on the West-East spectrum and explore what happens to the surveilled individual and their data under such regimes.The project asks what if data carried ghosts and what happens when such data is fed to the machine. In other words, it seeks to highlight the vulnerability of historically corrupt authoritarian regimes while creating a narrative in which the body can resist policing and surveillance. This project builds on speculative narratives and fieldwork, archival media, real-life anti-AI and -surveillance strategies, and the new materialist deconstruction of memory and power through sculptural assemblages.