Participating artists and their projects:
• Sándor Bodó Nagy - Wavecounter / 5th district Duna-bank, at the "Roosevelt tér" stop of the tram 2
• Filmpicnic: Open air cinema (14-16 July) / 8th district, Köztársaság tér
• Gábor Kerekes - Platform: mobile street stage / 5th district, Városháza park
• Miklós Mécs - Stethoscope shop window / 5th district, 22 Bajcsy Zsilinszky út
• the Randomroutines - Blank Wall: The Great Seedrescue / 7th district, 32 Rózsa utca

Curator: Rita Kálmán

Urban Potentials (UP) maps those possibilities that lie in urban public places and community locations used by citizens, the opportunities yet to be exploited, and thus seeks perspectives and creative solutions to form the urban environment. In the competition to increase their tourism and the number of their inhabitants, to attract new economic investors, and to improve their competitive power more and more cities try to shape their unique advantages into marketing-strategies that are becoming more and more alike. Thus, the urban-development strategies are usually composed of cheap, but thought to be effective infrastructural investments and developments of the cultural market based on adopted recipes. The actual potentials, recourses, and utopias of individual cities are not even discussed or considered in most of the cases. The task of the invited artists was to trace these possibilities in their own city (and in a later phase of the project in Dresden), to compare them to actual or prospective city planning conceptions, and to realise such public artworks that can have an incentive effect on urban development schemes and the use and utilisation of public places.
The European city - within this scheme - is not defined as a given construction, but as a laboratory, as a location of various processes. The involvement of various professional and art fields becomes relevant from this perspective since as a result of their cooperation with the policy-makers in charge of the primary shaping of public places, and their critical and creative working methods they can be initiators in the formation of both aesthetically and functionally successful community spaces.

The Budapest action-series in July is composed of five projects that are run in various spots in the city. The participating artists highlight relevant problems that determine the capital's daily life: the city's relationship to the Danube, the reinterpretation of the concept and function of public places, the increase of green areas in the city centre, the reutilisation of empty premises and shop windows that disfigure the cityscape, and the creation of the notion that in the formation of the city environment the inhabitants should play an active role.

The keystones of UP's Budapest program are the inventions of the invited artists. In addition, the conception of UP raises many issues that are not only dealt by fine art but other fields of art and recently more and more civil initiations.

UP is realised in the collaboration of five international art institutions: Kunsthaus Dresden (D); TENT, Rotterdam (NL); BWA, Galeria Awangarda, Wroclaw (PL); Galerie 5020, Salzburg (A); Studio of Young Artists Association, Budapest (H).

The junction of the parallel events is happening between 15 September - 4 November 2006 in Dresden, where public works reflecting on the urbanistic problems of Dresden are going to be realised.
Furthermore, a recapitulation of projects completed in other locations, and various artistic, curatorial, and other conceptions, working-methods, and experiences is taking place here. Thus this event provides an opportunity for the comparison and analysis of the urbanistic problems of five very different cities, and for reviewing the adaptability of various strategies.