COURAGE

connecting collections

In June 2017 the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage decided to create a new public institution: "National Film Archive - Audiovisual Institute" [FINA], formed by joining two previously working bodies: the National Film Archive and the Audiovisual Institute. The aim of the new institution was to collect, catalogue and renovate audiovisual heritage of the Polish culture, as well as produce and disseminate the new forms of audiovisual materials. FINA uses the potential and experience of the two institutions: rich content of the National Film Archive's registry and modern methods of digitalization used in the Audiovisual Institute (established only in 2009).

In September 2015, UMA curator Aniza Kraus attended a conference at the Library of Congress featuring Ukrainian culture. Congresswoman Marci Kaptur was the keynote speaker and one of the presenters was Jaime Monllor, the international outreach officer for the USHMM. At the conference Monllor indicated that one of the Holocaust Museum’s collection goals is documenting non-Jewish victims of persecution by the Nazis and their collaborators, with a particular interest in Ukraine. The UMA invited Monllor to come to Cleveland to see their DP camp collection. He brought three colleagues with him May 2016 to assess the collection. Impressed by what they saw, the USHMM came up with a grant for digitizing Ukrainian DP camp serials, rare published victims’ memoirs and of other related personal paper collections. Phase 1 was completed in February 2017, with support from Archival Data Systems (AIS) based in Kyiv. The parameters of Phase 2 are currently being discussed. Deepening cooperation between the USHMM and the UMA should not only provide scholars with the necessary resources to address understudied dimensions of the Holocaust and mass migration after WWII, it should also provide a more robust framework for understanding the implications of the Soviet-Nazi alliance of 1939 and how that shaped perspectives on and opposition to communism.   

In autumn of 2017 the Németh László Public Library heard about the existence of a volume of Galyasi’s typescripted poems. The volume was kept by the museum and is still being kept there. The volume, which included several elements that were unknown. The Library decided to publish the unknown poems and completed it with others. In April 2018 the Németh László Public Library competed for subsidy of National Cultural Found of Hungary. Dezső Béres, Ágnes Képiró and Attila Imre Kovács have been writing essays accompanying the poems.

In the period from 17 November 2017 to 31 January 2018, BCU Cluj-Napoca held the exhibition “Romania’s Royal Family: Testimonies from the Collections of Lucian Blaga Central University Library.” The exhibition displayed in the reading room of the Special Collections Department at BCU Cluj-Napoca photos, periodicals, brochures, and correspondence related to the Romania’s royal family from the collections that are in the custody of the institution. Among these items there were several documents from the Raţiu–Tilea Archives of the Romanian Exile Collection. Both Ion Raţiu and Viorel V. Tilea collected a large number of items related to the activities of the royal family in exile, including personal correspondence with King Michael of Romania. Due to the latter’s death on 5 December 2017, the exhibition also acquired a commemorative significance.

László Beke—the renowned Hungarian art historian and curator of several progressive art events of the 1970s—sent out a call to 28 artists, asking them to submit sheets that would fit into A4-size document folders following the concept “WORK = the DOCUMENTATION OF THE IMAGINATION/IDEA.” Beke arranged and preserved the sheets he received in folders and they could be viewed at his flat. Over the last ten years, due to the renewed interest in the collection, “Imagination” has been featured at several exhibitions both in Hungary and internationally and was also presented as a publication in itself. The English-language edition was initiated and edited by tranzit.hu and co-published by JRP Ringier.

The exhibition at Tranzitdisplay—organized by the tranzit network—looked at Beke’s collection in an international context through other projects that also took place in the year 1971 as well as through the history of conceptual art exhibitions. The other legendary 1971 art projects that were on display—similarly to the sheets of the Hungarian artists— can be interpreted as “exhibitions in a publication format.”

One of them is the book Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa presenting East European artists of the time and published at Dumont Aktuell by artist and collector Klaus Groh. The other exhibition projects highlighted are “At the Moment” (Zagreb) and “At Another Moment” (Belgrade) at which the curators Nena and Braco Dimitrijević experimented with the format of the exhibition in space and time. The two exhibitions showcased works by artists from Yugoslavia and by international representatives of conceptual art. The Belgrade exhibition also included a catalogue, which will also be on view.

Another aim of “Imagining Conceptual Art” was to survey László Beke’s international art network that unfolded beginning in the 1970s. The exhibition also gathered information about the internationality of the art world of the time centered around less object-oriented and increasingly dematerialized practices, which we now call, in a broad sense, conceptual art.

A possible map of the reception of conceptual art with a focus on geopolitical and cultural relations was also created for the exhibition. The timeline of the map starts from projects of the era, such as Beke’s collection or artist Dóra Maurer’s activity supporting the international presence of Hungarian artists, and runs until current projects that revisit the period of the 1960s and 1970s. This section looked primarily at the history of exhibitions, including artistic and curatorial research projects such as tranzit.hu’s “Parallel Chronologies: An Archive of East European Exhibitions.”

Works presented at the exhibition from the “Imagination” collection include those by Gábor Attalai, Imre Bak, Miklós Erdély, István Haraszty, György Jovánovics, Ilona Keserü Ilona, Dezső Korniss, László Lakner, János Major, Gyula Pauer, Géza Perneczky, Sándor Pinczehelyi and Péter Türk. The exhibition also featured reflections by contemporary artists Virág Bogyó, Judit Fischer and Szilárd Miklós, among others. The exhibition concept was developed by Dóra Hegyi, Zsuzsa László and Eszter Szakács in collaboration with László Beke. The Czech exhibition chronology was compiled by Pavlina Morganova, while the Slovak chronology was assembled by Daniel Grúň. The exhibition display was designed by by Zbyněk Baladrán and Ondřej Kozák.