[artinfo] 100 Hungarian Minutes @ Pavilion

[Pavilion]

The Westernisation of the Ex-Soviet Bloc

100 Hungarian Minutes

SCREENING

Thursday 16 January 2014, 19.00

@ PAVILION | center for contemporary art & 
culture | proudly supported by UniCredit ?iriac 
Bank

Artists: Miklós Erhardt, Zsolt Keserue, Gyula 
Július, Erika Baglyas, Gyula Pauer, János Sugár, 
Éva Emese Kiss

Curator: Gerg‘ Horváth

The curator will held a Q&A after the screening.
FB event: www.facebook.com/events/283481671803585/

  "Hungary has known a very rapid economic growth 
after the fall of communism, subsequently 
becoming at the end of the '90s the model-state 
for many of the countries in Central and 
South-eastern Europe, having an open-minded and 
democratic ideology. Living its communist history 
as an accumulative experience, rather than a 
nostalgic one, it was maybe one of the first and 
only countries in the ex-soviet bloc where a 
rupture between recent history and the 
contemporary world was apparent.

'What I am worried about is how the far-right, 
what was 20 years ago the domain of the 
far-right, is setting, even if they are a 
minority , they're setting the general agenda.', 
said Slavoj ÎiÏek. After a clean drift from 
communism to democracy, an oscillation can be 
observed between right- and left-wing politics, 
lately the right side gaining more and more 
terrain. Is it just a transitional period or will 
the Zeitgeist change forever? Hungarians always 
were nationalists. Is this the key to their 
success, or will it be the element which will 
ruin the state? Can a country founded on 
Christian principles uphold, even after a 
millennium, the same ideals and at the same time 
call itself a democratic state? If this mentality 
will win, it will be a Pyrrhic victory.

In a country which produced Nobel laureates, 
important artists and curators and a prestigious 
school of psychoanalysis, for the last years the 
contemporary artists have been struggling with 
censorship, traditionalism, racial and ethnic 
inequality, and a nationalist, aggressive mental 
mechanism of the deciding masses. In a country in 
which extremist movements are gaining ground and 
are inciting to hate on a national and 
international scale, the political pressure can 
be felt as much in the institutional practice as 
in the artistic discourse, generating debates in 
the Hungarian academic and artistic field.

A paradox appears. How can a country which has 
such a blood-filled and extremist history become 
the image of liberalism in Europe, after which 
becoming an example of discretionary politics 
asserted by radical governments? Maybe this 
liberalist image only exists on the surface. If 
the past government sent combat vehicles against 
revolts from Budapest caused by the same 
government, the actual leadership modified the 
Constitution without a referendum and says that a 
state without military force cannot be a powerful 
entity. The lack of coherence in the discourse of 
the leadership, be it political or spiritual, is 
producing a societal imbalance and a notable 
fracture between the progressive and the 
traditionalist parties. Nationalism and 
conservatism vs. progressivism and contemporary 
thought." (Gerg‘ Horváth)

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Gerg‘ Horváth (b. 1993) is an artist, curator and 
cultural manager. He studied music and is 
presently a student, interested in theory and 
contemporary art. He considers himself 
self-taught, even though he attends a university. 
He lives in Cluj and Bucharest.

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"100 MINUTES" is a program based on the 
curatorial process applied to video art, which 
reflects the artists' position in relation to the 
social and political context of the country from 
which they come. To date, 100 Swedish, Holland, 
Romanian and Finnish minutes have been realized 
and 100 American and Greek minutes are in 
progress. A project realized by Ra˜zvan Ion and 
Eugen Ra˜descu, who appointed the curators of 
each national section.

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The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Gerg‘ Horváth.

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The screening is supported by

PAVILION - journal for politics and culture

C©¯ Center for Culture & Communication Foundation.