Hungarian Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale
Readers familiar with Hungarian politics may be dismayed, but perhaps not particularly surprised, to learn of the trouble surrounding the competition for the Hungarian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. The jury selected Csaba Nemes’s project Remake, which deals with the public disturbances in Budapest last autumn, only to have their choice overruled by the Ministry of Culture on the grounds of a procedural technicality.
Curated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Nemes’s presentation for the Hungarian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale
is conceived as a series of animation films entitled Remake, which takes as their subject the dramatic public events in Budapest that gripped the world in autumn 2006. These ten short films focus on intensive media coverage of the disturbances, individual experiences through personal narratives and the emancipatory power of nascent urban myths. On a more general level, Remake as a contemporary art project creates a space to investigate the modalities of disorder, and the possibilities and problems inherent in it.
The reason given for the last-minute rejection of Nemes’s piece was that it had been curated by two individuals, rather than one. A selection of press commentaries translated into English is available here, the artist’s statement can be read here.
The disturbances on the streets of Budapest and other cities and towns last year put Hungarian current affairs on newspaper front pages around the world. Ostensibly a reaction to Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s speech leaked on 17 September, demonstrators demanded Gyurcsány’s resignation on the basis that he had lied to the electorate.
Nemes engages with the claim to re-enact history fifty years on from the 1956 Uprising, the theatricality of protest, and the mediation of such imagery in the press. The 2006 disturbances may not have constituted a revolution, but they certainly were televised: a picture gallery is available here on the Index news site; a selection of videos is here. More recently, the barrier around Kossuth Square was dismantled in what was described by participants as a repeat performance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, and further demonstrations have been planned for 15 March, the anniversary of the start of the 1848 revolution.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
[...] For more information, see the REMAKE website and our earlier post. [...]