Hungarian Studies in London
Andrea Talabér recently presented the work of Hungarian historian and Open Society Archives director István Rév, together with articles from Népszabadság covering the official 15 March celebrations of 1967 and 1974. Andrea outlined Rév’s focus on the function of show trials, and the manipulation of personal histories (not to mention historical dates), within the context [...]
In her recent talk on the subject of her research in progress (nationalism in Hungarian popular culture), Jenny Rasell addressed a number of matters. Remarking on the sudden proliferation of nationalist symbols, and with reference to recent opinion polls and academic research on xenophobia, antisemitism, racism and homophobia in Hungary, Jenny presented a number of texts [...]
We discussed the interwar népi-urbánus vita, with a view to understanding its context, semantics and contemporary articulation. Commonly referred to in English as the dispute between (agrarian) populists and urbanists (or ‘metropolitans’), and undoubtedly a major component of public political discourse since 1989, we began by reaching consensus on what it was not: a clash [...]
On 5 July, the thirteenth annual Gay Dignity march (Meleg Méltóság Menet, or melegfelvonulás) took place in Budapest. On the same day in London, around half a million people celebrated Gay Pride; even Boris Johnson wore a pink cowboy hat on the procession. In Budapest, around one thousand people marched in between metal barriers, accompanied [...]
Opening tomorrow at the Kiscelli Museum in Budapest is Csaba Nemes’s REMAKE I-X, a series of ten animated sequences dealing with the riots in Hungary last year. The following is an excerpt from Maja and Reuben Fowkes’s ‘Sooner or Later the Tanks Will Appear’:
The work features ten animated sequences that originated in media coverage, video [...]
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 [...]