Hajnal Németh works at the intersection of visual art and music. Her interdisciplinary practice includes performances, moving-image formats, and site-specific audiovisual installations. Her works draw on notations, scores, poems, occasionally archival materials, quotations from various sources as well as on her own writings. Her innovative approach to time, rhythm, and intonation, along with her playful questioning of structures of meaning, often manifests in minimalist interventions into existing materials such as texts, musical works, objects or the environment. In her collaborations with composers and performers, she experiments with the arbitrary construction and deconstruction of contexts. Her process-based works, which start from scripts and then evolve through impulses arising during development and improvisational methods, are often realized in multiple versions.
Hajnal Németh (*1972, Szőny, Hungary) lives and works since 2002 in Berlin. Her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at renowned art institutions, including: Blinken OSA Archivum, Budapest (2025, 2013); Museum Ostwall, Dortmund (2023); n.b.k. – Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2021); Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest (2022, 2020, 2016, 2008, 2003); MODEM – Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen (2019); Centre d’art contemporain, Meymac (2018); The Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam (2017); Kunsthalle Emden (2017); Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2016); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015, 2012); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2014); Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (2014); Picasso Museum, Barcelona (2011); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2010); mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; (2009); Temporären Kunsthalle Berlin (2008); MAMC – Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, St-Etienne (2008); The Kitchen, New York (2006); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2005); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2004); Tate Modern, London (2004); SAM – Singapore Art Museum (2004); TENT, Rotterdam (2002); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2001); Casino Luxembourg (2001); ICA – Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2001); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2000).
Her work was nominated for the Nam June Paik Award in 2010.
She presented her installation in a solo exhibition at the Hungarian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. In addition, she was featured at the Berlin Biennale in 2001, the Vienna Biennale in 2006 and the OFF-Biennale in 2015.
In 2019 Németh founded YELLOW SOLO, an initiative in Berlin for time- and process-based artistic formats that explore musical systems and references, including works by André Vida, Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Annika Kahrs, Dani Gal, Anri Sala, Arnold Dreyblatt, Olaf Nicolai, Zorka Wollny, Luciano Chessa, among others.
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