"The trench is not as deep as the engineer has calculated"
(Lajos Kassák: 41. (25 new poems), Book of Purity, 1926)

Tamás Kaszás' exhibition The trench is not as deep/ as the engineer has calculated" has the fate of avant-garde utopias as its base, asking about tension between ideas and implementation for the future. As art of the exhibition, the artists is to build the life-size reconstruction of Kassák's kiosk design on the main square. At the same time, it is a re-interpretation of the work, in which the Constructivist image architecture becomes an experiment as a walk-around object, stripped of purity. The first version of the installation was shown in Halle, Germany in 2013, "Utopien vermeiden?" (Can utopias be avoided ?) was shown at a contemporary art festival.

In the centre of the art of Tamás Kaszás, we find issues of ecology, economy and society. In his approach, what dominate are the autonomous individual and community, collaboration -based solutions, re-organization of empirical and theoretical knowledge, the marginal points of view, as well as aspects of sustainability. The thematic work groups crystallizing from individual creations and installations from can be interpreted as an alternative models of society which were spelled out against global order and the various forms of oppression. The present exhibition presents works that question the validity and reality of these strategies, perhaps with a view to avoid the fate of the utopian aspirations.

Kaszás focuses on avant-garde advertisings promoting the ideas of modernity and also the genre of kiosks in order to map ideas on society. In the 1920s international exhibitions abundant with scientific and cultural innovations and industrial products required new forms pf presentation and new forms of advertising. Avant-garde artists and architects took active part in the design of these installations, ephemeral architectural solutions, and advert kiosks as well. Advertisings and kiosks were not solely the heralds of the achievements of modernity and a new quality. Society shaping role was attributed to these, which allowed public access to new ideas on a wide scale. The boundaries between the medium of advertising and "demonstrations" of arts programs loosened, as is illustrated by a number of pieces in the collection of Tamás Kassák and items from the Kassák Museum's collection as well.

Tamás Kaszás constructed the former utopian designs as abandoned, modified, ruins lost function. The program of modernity is still unrealised. The residues, which were used as raw materials by Kaszás are involved in our culture having lost their utopian feature, faded, transformed. This is where realism come from and potential feasibility of social models drafted by the artist. As Kassák in his book on advertising theory, the "Book of Purity" suggested, it requires a jump to know that "the trench is not as deep/ as the engineer has calculated by the engineer ".