Sprang Exhibition

In 2024 the arts and applied arts exhibitions will continue at the House of Arts. While in 2023 the focus was on contemporary glass and jewellery, this year the focus is on textiles.

On the first floor of the Dubniczay Palace, visitors will be able to see a special and unique exhibition that presents one of the oldest textile-making techniques, sprang, from both a historical and a contemporary perspective.

Its history is rich in human history. It appears again and again in different eras and continents. The earliest find in Europe, near Borum in Denmark, dates back to the Early Bronze Age (around 1400) in 1871, when sprang was already an unknown technique. By this time the technique had become almost unknown, although it had been used for centuries to make various pieces of clothing, belts and headdresses.

Sprang is a simple basic braiding technique, known since Neolithic times, which creates an elastic textile with an axis of symmetry in the structure and pattern of the fabric; the variations that can be created are almost infinite. With its easy spatial shapes, it is also suitable for creative art.

In the exhibition, the works of Hungarian and international (Canadian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Japanese, Norwegian) contemporary artists show that with enough openness and imagination, autonomous and utilitarian objects can be made with this unusual technique, using a wide variety of materials. This is complemented by textile artefacts made using the sprang technique, on loan from the Ethnographic Museum and the Museum of Applied Arts, which give a taste of the extremely rich patterning that characterises these traditional braided garments.

At the exhibition, visitors will be able to try out the technique in a communal braiding session, creating a shared sprang at the end of the exhibition, symbolising interconnectedness.

Curators: Szonja Dohnál, Márta Egervári