Budapest Artineris is a project dedicated to contemporary art, created with a simple objective: to make the city’s art scene more visible, accessible and connected. From 21 to 27 September 2026, artists, galleries, foundations, institutions, associations, curators and independent spaces come together within a single programme, freely accessible to the public.

But above all, Budapest Artineris is an experiment: it is the first time that the model developed through Rome Art Week has been brought outside Italy, to explore how a system born and developed in Rome can be adapted to another European city while maintaining its fundamental principles: free participation, a city-wide approach, autonomy for participants, openness and collaboration.

Budapest is therefore the first step in a project that aims to gradually create a network of cities united by a different way of presenting and experiencing contemporary art.

From the experience of Rome Art Week to Budapest

Over the years, Rome Art Week has demonstrated that it is possible to build a major art event without concentrating activities in a single venue and without replacing the organisations and individuals already active within the city. The principle we start from is very simple: art is already in the city. It is in artists’ studios, galleries, foundations, institutions, independent spaces and curatorial projects. There is no need to artificially create a new container; what is needed is to make what already exists visible and to connect it.

Budapest Artineris is therefore not an art fair and does not have a central venue: every participant maintains their own identity, space and programme. Galleries and exhibition spaces can present exhibitions that are open during the week, artists can open their studios to the public, and curators can propose projects, visits and routes.

The city itself becomes the venue for the event, and the public is invited to explore it through art, freely creating their own itinerary through familiar places as well as spaces that usually remain outside the most visible cultural circuits. Visiting an exhibition can become an opportunity to discover an unfamiliar space; entering an artist’s studio offers the chance to experience the place where works are conceived and created; joining a tour can connect different experiences that, despite belonging to the same city, rarely have the opportunity to be presented together.

This is one of the fundamental principles of Artineris: not to take art out of the city, but to make visible the art that is already present within it.

An independent project by choice

Budapest Artineris receives no public or private funding. This first edition has been made possible by the voluntary work of those who believed in the project and by the commitment of the people and organisations that chose to collaborate.

We do not consider this merely a consequence of being at an early stage, but a deliberate choice in the way the project has been conceived. From the outset, Artineris has been designed to exist independently of external funding, because a cultural project built around the continuous need to secure financial resources risks coming to an end when those resources are no longer available.

We wanted to take the opposite approach: first build a lightweight, free, shared and sustainable structure capable of continuing to exist and grow even without funding. Future resources will of course be valuable and may allow us to expand communication, develop new tools and improve services, but they should never become a prerequisite for the project’s survival.

This independence makes possible a growth that we believe will, over time, become inevitable: every new artist, curator, gallery, institution, space and event adds something to a network that already exists and does not need to be rebuilt from scratch with each new edition. Its growth therefore depends not simply on increasing financial resources, but above all on multiplying people, connections and relationships.

An open project to build together

Artineris is not intended to be a closed format, defined once and then replicated identically in different cities. It is an open project that seeks and welcomes the collaboration of everyone involved in contemporary art.

Artists, curators, galleries, foundations, associations, institutions and independent spaces are not simply invited to take part in an event; they can actively contribute to building the project itself. A gallery that connects the artists in its exhibition to the platform, an artist who encourages other artists to open their studios, a curator who creates a route, an institution that makes its programme visible: each of these actions contributes to expanding the same network.

We do not want to determine from above what the image of contemporary art in Budapest should be. Instead, we want to provide the tools that allow its protagonists to build that image themselves.

For this reason, the platform is not designed simply to communicate a week of events: the profiles of artists, curators and organisations, together with the connections that gradually develop between them, form the basis of a permanent mapping of contemporary art, intended to become richer over time. The event is the moment when attention is concentrated and encounters are encouraged; the network, however, remains and continues to grow.

From galleries to artists, from Open Studios to tours

For this first international experience, we deliberately chose to focus our initial efforts primarily on galleries and exhibition spaces. We needed to begin with an immediately identifiable component of the city’s art ecosystem, establish an initial network of places and begin mapping contemporary art in Budapest.

But this is only the starting point. The experience of Rome Art Week has taught us that one of the most important components of a city-wide art event is represented by artists and curators, and they will once again become the priority as we develop future editions.

Greater participation by artists will make it possible to increase the number of Open Studios, opening normally inaccessible places to the public and creating a direct relationship between those who produce art and those who wish to discover it. At the same time, increasing participation by curators will encourage the development of more tours and guided visits, connecting artists, studios, galleries, exhibitions and spaces through different perspectives and itineraries.

The public will therefore have access not only to a calendar of events, but to multiple ways of interpreting and exploring the city’s contemporary art scene.

A network designed to grow

Budapest Artineris lasts for one week, but Artineris is designed to be permanent. Every edition adds people, places, information and relationships; every new city can add another node to the network.

We do not simply want to replicate Rome Art Week elsewhere. We want to use the experience gained in Rome to build a model that each city can gradually make its own, transforming it through the participation of its local art community.

Budapest represents the first international experiment and, precisely for this reason, the success of this first edition cannot be measured solely by the number of events or participants: it will be measured above all by what we are able to build together from this starting point.

Artineris grows through participation and, precisely because its existence does not depend on the availability of funding, every new participant makes the network larger, more useful and more difficult to interrupt.

Budapest Artineris is an event, a platform and an open network: it begins with the experience of Rome Art Week, but is intended to progressively belong to the cities and the people who choose to become part of it.