PAST, CONTINUOUS – Contemporary Reflections on the Cultural Legacy of
Socialism
28 May – 20 June 2014
Fészek Artists' Club | 1073 Budapest, Kertész utca 36.
Exhibitors: Balázs Antal & László Hatházi | Erika Baglyas | Phil Collins
| Marcell Esterházy | Gábor Gerhes | Gruppo Tökmag | Barbara Ipsics |
Olívia Kovács | Eszter Dóra Molnár | Ciprian Muresan | Tilo Schulz |
Gyula Várnai | Gitte Villesen | Artur Żmijewski
Curator: Edina Nagy
Associate Curators: Zsófia Bene, Nóra Feigl, Anna Juhász, Zsófia Márton,
Emese Mucsi, Júlia Salamon
Our exhibition focuses on the relationship between the official culture
of the socialist era and the contemporary artworks reflecting upon that.
We attempted to pose the questions as to how this rather despised but
robust legacy could be treated, what to do with the ideologically
contaminated cultural heritage of this period, and how to regard the
artworks of the socialist realist* '50s and those of the Kádár era both
stemming from similar ideas but representing dissimilar ways of expression.
It is quite controversial how we relate to the socialist decades due to
its recency directly involving our present, e.g. by a multitude of still
open cases like the name change of streets and squares, the
non-disclosure of the list of informants and state agents, and political
efforts to hold people responsible for the terror (Lex Biszku). The
attitudes towards the era alternate from nostalgia and embellishment to
extreme refusal. Paradoxically, the compulsive denial and reconstruction
of certain things are both working in a space and context still
characterized by the legacy of the same times. Parallel trends determine
the mechanisms governing our response to the socialist art when we fail
to classify scarcely any buildings constructed in the period as
monuments, and when we keep valuable artworks in museum collections in
perfect invisibility.
The main features of the exhibition consist of the diverse attitudes
towards these issues: conscious abuse of symbols transmitting visual
experience across generations, allusions to the cult of replication,
exposure of works against suppression, and mindful strategies for
processing the memory. The exhibit comprises creations of critical
approach, concept ideas using visual aspects only as reference, and
works processing personal biographical concerns. The invited artists
coming from a wide range of generations and countries display broadly
divergent perspectives.
When observing the relations of art and propaganda, one certainly
recognizes the bizarre anomaly of mass production and overexploitation
of symbols, which, along with gestures, and other well-known socialist
realist formulæ of pathos, got devoid of meaning, annihilated themselves
by obsessive repetition. A couple of exhibited works are concerned with
this paradox condition showing a way out through reinterpretation.
We considered it important to make a conscious decision when choosing
the location. The quest was not only to find an emblematic building of
the era but also to find a meaningful site connected to the artistic
life of the time. The interior of Fészek Artists' Club, founded in 1901,
was transformed during the Kádár regime in a way that created a peculiar
symbiosis of the bourgeois milieu and socialist modernism. Fészek played
a special role at this time by working as a transitional zone on the
borders of different cultural policies.
The exhibition sections are linked by a particular installation adjusted
to the properties of Fészek. This installation is made of plastic yarn
from one of the closed textile factories once booming and dominating the
socialist market. The leading thread meandering in the rooms and places
evokes the material culture of the recent past fond of plastic, and
transforms the whole space of the exhibition.
By involving people from diverse arts and disciplines and completing the
exhibition with related events, our aim is to foster an environment that
helps conceive and raise questions otherwise remaining implicit. The
exhibition is designed to make visible our ongoing processing of these
recent times in a way that can contribute to the reinterpretation of
this ambivalent heritage.
*Though we did not take into consideration any anniversaries when
preparing, interestingly, the exhibition happens to take place on the
eightieth jubilee of the first appearance of the expression "socialist
realism". The first public usage of this word combination occurred at
the Soviet Union of Writers in 1934.
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