“What is Hungarian?” Interview Questions
Gabor Gulyas, director of the Mucsarnok, was the curator of the What is Hungarian? exhibition held there August to October of 2012. As I’ve mentioned, What is Hungarian? (Mi a magyar?) … Continue reading
Studio Visit with Little Warsaw
Little Warsaw is the collaboration of András Gálik and Bálint Havas, two Hungarian artists who have been creating artwork that deals with culture and context together since 1999. I went … Continue reading
Studio Visit with Adrián Kupcsik
I had a studio visit with painter Adrián Kupcsik yesterday, going to his apartment, and from there one floor up to his studio. In the past few years he has … Continue reading
Uncertainty about whether the past really is past
“Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the past. What animates such appeals is not only the disagreement about what happened in the past … Continue reading
Politics and the Whale
“We see that is can be as false to create a politics-free fictional universe as to create one in which nobody needs to work or eat or hate or love … Continue reading
Studio Visit with Borsos Lőrinc
On November 21st, I had a studio visit with Borsos Lőrinc, a pair of artists who have been working together since 2008. János Borsos and Lilla Lőrinc took me to … Continue reading
Taboo Cultural Memory
“As an aftermath of the inability to carry through the “trauma process”, the culture of the Socialist past became a taboo issue. Leaving the past as it is, and not … Continue reading
Cleaning Up Monuments of Socialism
“In the beginning of the nineties the satellite countries became free from the colonizing foreign power, the Soviet-type Socialism. The new democratic countries tried to “clean up” the ideologically polluted … Continue reading
Accumulated Traumas
“…the phenomenon of accumulated traumas, as a more appropriate term to define the post-socialist condition, that is, a kind of turbulence of unassimilated, unmourned earlier traumas of the Socialist past, … Continue reading
A blend, not an oppposition, of old socialist and new capitalist
“The discrete charm of the Post-Socialist condition is precisely that it nurtures hybrid phenomenon, hardly known and recognizable from the outside, that is the post-communist hangovers could greatly have been … Continue reading
Context & Identity in Contemporary Hungarian Art 