"The Golden Lion for an outstanding national participation is being given to a Pavilion where architecture and cultural history are deployed to generate intelligent and poetic relations between content, visual language and structural display," the jury said of the pavilion.
"The Jury also considers important the artist's approach to modernity, its utopias and failures in the context of a shared history."
Fogarasi, together with Kultur und Freizeit's curator Katalin Tímár and the national commissioner of the Hungarian pavilion Zsolt Petrányi, received the award at a ceremony in the Teatro Arsenale on Wednesday. The award was presented by Biennale chairman Davide Croff and head curator Robert Storr.
Photo: Péter Kollányi (MTI)
Just four Hungarians have been acknowledged at the Biennale, which is being held for the 52nd time this year: Károly Ferenczy received the Golden Lion for painting in 1905, Fülöp László received the same award in 1907, Vilmos Aba Novák received the best foreign painter award in 1940 and Joseph Kossuth was presented with the Biennale special award in 1993.
Fogarasi was born in Austria, but has Hungarian roots. His installation shows short videos of local cultural centres in and around Budapest on six monitors. The videos, made with minimal equipment, show the interiors of the mostly empty centres, with background noise, street noise, music or snippets of conversation.
