Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives
Press Room
Since the launch of Budapest 100, a successful Budapest based urban festival, the Goldberger House, where Blinken OSA operates, has opened its gates to visitors. This year too, Blinken OSA participates in the program. The Goldberger House and the festival are strongly linked: the idea of Budapest 100, i.e. to celebrate 100-year-old buildings in Budapest, came up when the Goldberger House was 100 years old.
The first Budapest 100 festival in 2011 was organized by the Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre and Blinken OSA Archives with smashing success. Since then this fantastic urban and civil festival has grown and has helped genuine urban communities to take shape. This year the festival celebrates its 10th anniversary and the Goldberger House will open its gates to visitors again.
For more than a decade, photographer Lenke Szilágyi (who has also been working as a photo-archivist in the Archives for a number of years) has regularly traveled to the (former) Soviet Union, witnessing and documenting the fall of Communism and Post-Soviet realities not only in large centers like Moscow or St. Petersburg but also in the provinces (the Black Sea coast, the Volga region, Karelia, etc.). Her photos are sensitive imprints of an era of constant change and territory of eternal immutability. She depicts in her portraits the hopes and despairs of the time, while also adding her own witty commentaries in the diary entries accompanying the photos. This exhibition is the first major presentation of this collection.
ANNIVERSARY
July 6, 1999. The young exhibition space of the Archives, the Galeria Centralis welcomed the media and visitors to a mysterious event. The minimalist invitation previously sent out stirred up the imagination of the public that began to speculate whether what the Archives had come up with this time.
THE NOTE
“Through the coincidental coming together of historic events, those listening to the arguments in the legal protest in Parliament passed a slip of paper from hand to hand with news of János Kádár’s death.” MTV 1. News. July 6, 1989.
On July 6, 1999, at 9:16 a.m., the occasion of the tenth anniversary of a historic coincidence, Centralis Galeria would like to invite you to a recollection of the chance event (Nádor u. 11., Budapest).
The event lived up to the expectations of the invitees, as those present could be part of a historical reconstruction of the “coincidence” of the death of János Kádár, a significant political figure of the 20th century, and a court decision serving historical justice.
For further details, see our virtual exhibition recalling the event.
Blinken OSA – Night of the Museums, June 27, 2020 – Online
This unprecedented Night of the Museums will be online, Blinken OSA offers a rich variety of cultural and artistic programs. There will be an interesting report about Hungarian museums, archives, and libraries titled The Laborers of Culture. Data on the Situation of Public Collections. It will be available online all through the night. What follows will be an interesting house tour by Iván Székely around the Goldberger House. After the tour, our colleague Örs Lehel Tari will give an interesting presentation on 1989 regime change.
One of the highlights of the program will be the online discussion between art historian József Mélyi and editor-reporter Júlia Ránki. The special edition of this conversation will focus, among other things, on the Night of the Museums, on the museum development project Liget, on new decrees and laws, and, above all, on COVID-19 and the museums. The discussion will be followed by an online public lecture by András Mink, historian, titled Where Did the Democratic Opposition Disappear?. There are no Nighs of the Museums without exhibition at Blinken OSA, so this year the exhibition titled POST-SOVIET – The Photos of Lenke Szilágyi 1990–2002 Virtual exhibition will be opened by Endre Kukorelly.
The exhibition opening will be followed by a film screening, and the online mode will give the chance to "repeat" some program elements for those who cannot speak Hungarian.
Parallel film screenings of András Szirtes film director and Dalia Neis (VSP fellow)
Birds (8 mins.) - András Szirtes Goray 1648 (7 mins.)- Dalia Neis
Gravitation(21 mins.) - András Szirtes Saints (5 mins.) - Dalia Neis
Diary no. 10 (25 mins.) - András Szirtes Missing Meilich (21 mins) - Dalia Neis
Time: Tuesday, March 10, 2020 at 6:00 p.m.
Location: Blinken OSA Archives, 1051 Budapest, Arany János u. 32.
This film program forges a rare intergenerational dialogue between two artist-filmmakers who work with the essay form as a means to subvert and reimagine the archive, its relationship to history and memory.
March 4, 2020, 6pm
Religion on trial? Film and religion during Communism
This film screening event presents Communist-era representations of religion of trial. We contrast a Khrushchev-era anti-religious propaganda film from the Soviet Union with a Hungarian film that employs an ethnographic eye on its object of derision. The screenings will be followed by a discussion with the curators and researchers of the Hidden Galleries project, James Kapaló and Kinga Povedák who will present their own research and that of Hidden Galleries collaborator Tatiana Vagramenko.
Free screenings between February 20 and May 28 of the most successful films from the 16th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival. Eight films will be shown—including the winners and audience favorites—followed by discussions with the filmmakers, experts, journalists, and human rights activists.
The second film of the Re:Verzió series is the winner of the Hungarian Audience Award of the 16th Verzió Film Festival:
March 5, 2020, 6 p.m.
THE EUPHORIA OF BEING
Director: Réka Szabó
Hungary, 2019, 83 min, Hungarian with English subtitles
Religion through the lenses of the secret police
This exhibition is about the ways in which Communist totalitarian states through secret police operations “captured” religion in images, graphics, texts, and folders in order to control and eliminate those they deemed untrustworthy.
Free screenings between February 20 and May 28 of the most successful films from the 16th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival.
The traditional Spring film club of Verzió will bring you once more some of the most beloved films from the program of the latest festival edition. 8 films will be shown - including the winners and audience favorites - followed by discussions with the filmmakers, local experts, journalists, and human rights activists.
Venues: Blinken OSA Archive & Central European University