Virtual Exhibitions

This exhibit approaches the Fall of Communism from a broad historical perspective that presents the pre-history of the highly-visible and well documented public events of 1989, using amateur photographs, Western and Hungarian propaganda newsreels, Radio Free Europe research publications, state security services surveillance documents, samizdat and opposition activists’ materials, as well as 1989-related ephemera from our collections.

It opens just prior to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the thwarted popular attempt to leave the Communist bloc, and the secret trial, execution and burial of the Revolution’s leaders in 1958. We show how the Revolution was documented from multiple perspectives, and how its memory was officially denied and suppressed in Hungary, before being mobilized again in the 1980s by the democratic...

Among a range of interesting Post-Communist cultural phenomena, we have witnessed the emergence of what has been labeled the New Middle Ages by Umberto Eco. The resurrected Middle Ages in Hungary and East-Central Europe, however, exhibits different traits from West European festivals and spectacles. Above all, the phenomenon lies much closer to politics, sometimes with positive overtones, but, unfortunately, frequently with menacing, even destructive effects. Medieval monuments became a central battleground in the wars that marked the dissolution of Yugoslavia. And this is not atypical, political battles continue to be fought around medieval sites throughout the region. The centuries-old ruins of medieval fortresses and grand church edifices are being reconstructed, resurrected from the annals of history, to be turned into national...

The exhibition stages the work of Normantas Paulius, a Lithuanian born photographer, traveller and researcher from Hungary. The approximately 190 photos taken over 20 years in 10 countries of the Far East will be exhibited in respect for Robert Capa.

The photographer comments:
"During humid Asian nights, I converse with vanished cities, their people and temples, with Buddhist treasures along the Mekong. They tell me about peace and war in these lands. As there had been more war, in the East I take more photographs of PEACE."

Words from Skirmantas Valiulis, famed Lithuanian photo critic:
"Photographer Paulius Normantas is a phenomenon: he does everything by himself, much of it in reverse. After his first exhibits, at a time when the Lithuanian school of photography had achieved sufficient renown both at home and...

The Open Society Archives has arranged a series of programs on the occasion of the opening of the new Hungarian national exhibit, on the former site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The opening of the Hungarian exhibit in Auschwitz coincides with the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, more than four hundred and thirty thousand of whom perished in Auschwitz, the epicenter of the Holocaust.

OSA has decided to reconstruct the first two official Hungarian Auschwitz exhibits, which opened on site during the time of Communist rule in 1965 and 1980, respectively. The two exhibits, in line with the official historiography, retroactively replaced the Jewish inmates with communist anti-fascist resistors in the camps; the Jews had been killed in Auschwitz, and their traces were lost...