Press Room - 2023

December 10 is Human Rights Day, observing this year the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This milestone celebration comesis just a week after the UN’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities on December 3. On this double occasion, we are happy to announce that the records of the International Federation of Persons with Physical Disability have been included to Blinken OSA Archivum’s holdings, marking a significant expansion in our collection focus.

Budapest is celebrating the 150th anniversary of its unification today. The Blinken OSA Archivum, a unit of CEU, has been operating in Budapest since 1995. During this time, our colleagues launched projects like Budapest100, Fortepan, or the Yellow Star Houses website. For the capital’s 150th birthday, we have prepared several gifts. Today, we unveil our renewed online catalog, also including two new, Budapest-related collections: the archive of Budapest Week, a weekly magazine capturing the vibrant life of Budapest in the 1990s, and István Bartók’s street photographs of Budapest in the 2000s. Next week, the Verzió Film Festival, founded 20 years ago by the Archivum staff, devotes a special section to documentaries about the city.

The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (Blinken OSA Archivum) at Central European University (CEU) based primarily in Budapest, but with teaching tasks in Vienna, Austria invites applications for the Digital Archivist position.  Blinken OSA Archivum is part of Central European University (www.ceu.edu), one of the most multinational graduate institutions in Europe, engaged primarily in the humanities and social sciences. The Archivum is a complex institution of memory that supports scholarship, is engaged in research, is the initiator of high visibility public programs, and manages the Archives and Evidentiary Practices specialization at the History and Legal Studies Departments at CEU. The Archivum is also an “archive of last resort”, the archive of (politically and otherwise) endangered collections. Blinken OSA Archivum hopes to attract a unique intellectual who is ready to experiment and to take calculated professional and intellectual challenges; who is passionate about new archival and library theories, technologies, trends in digital media, digital humanities, and open access; and who is highly knowledgeable about emerging IT solutions.

Blinken OSA Archivum, Galeria Centralis September 14 – December 3, 2023 Exhibition opening: September 14, Thursday, 6:00 p.m. (The event is held in Hungarian.) Opening remarks by: István Rév, Director, Blinken OSA Archivum Eszter Susán, Program Manager, Jewish Life Program, Tom Lantos Institute Opening speech by: András Kovács, Professor, CEU Jewish Studies Program Curator: Daniel Véri Graphic designer: Sarolta Ágnes Erdélyi, Hajnalka Illés Exhibiting artists: Tibor Barabás, Gyula Hincz, György Jovánovics, János Kass, Béla Kondor, György Konecsni, Gyula Konfár, József Péri, Endre Szász

We, members of the CEU Democracy Institute, the CEU Institute for Advanced Study and the Blinken OSA Archivum, express our solidarity with Dr. Zoltán Ádám, recently dismissed from his position as associate professor of economics at Corvinus University. Justice for Dr. Zoltán Ádám!

In the context of the current wars, many analysts have proclaimed the end of Pax Americana, bringing about tectonic geopolitical shifts and either the final conclusion or the confirmation of the Cold War and its dichotomies. The Blinken OSA Archivum in Budapest, Hungary, invites researchers, journalists, and artists to reflect on the Lessons from the Cold War by taking cues from the Archivum’s collections, one of the world’s largest holdings on the history of the Cold War and of human rights violations.

This roundtable discussion explores the various ways the Holocaust was represented in Cold War Central Europe, considering major examples of official memory politics, exhibition histories, fine arts, and literature in the 1960s. It considers the agency of state actors, the Jewish community, as well as individuals, especially artists and writers, paying special attention to the eminent role played by the antifascist historical narrative. OSA Archivum’s current exhibition offers a starting point for the discussion. Titled “Commissioned Memory. Hungarian Exhibitions in Auschwitz, 1960/1965,” it introduces a monumental fine arts collection commissioned for the 1965 Hungarian exhibition in Auschwitz, as well as an exceptional work from 1960 (‘Vampire Hitler,’ based on Simon Wiesenthal’s 1946 drawing), created for the same venue.

The Book published by The MIT Press is an absorbing exploration of Soviet-era family photographs that demonstrates the singular power of the photographic image to command attention, resist closure, and complicate the meaning of the past.

The exhibition and book project introduces completely forgotten yet exceptional works of art exhibited at the first Hungarian exhibition in Auschwitz in 1960 as well as a monumental fine arts collection commissioned for the 1965 permanent exhibition at the same venue. With the addition of the earliest Hungarian artworks dealing with the Roma Holocaust, the current exhibition highlights the absence of the issue from the 1960s shows.

The exhibition Cuban Architectures: The Third Space explores, through the lens of architecture, the antagonistic context that has characterized Cuba from the decades before the Cuban Revolution to the present day. The exhibition aims to create a Third Space where conflicting ideological narratives can meet and engage in dialogue. By walking through the presented materials, visitors can construct their own interpretations of the complexities of Cuban history and its present.  

The second IUFU Summer School, taking place in Budapest, July 2–10, 2023, provides Ukrainian students with the opportunity to discuss, with globally renowned scholars, issues like national canon-building, and develop strategies to valorize Ukrainian culture. The summer school also includes the exhibition Unissued Diplomas open to the public at CEU, and a panel discussion at the Blinken OSA Archivum on archival Cold War records on Ukraine.

The workshop brings together film scholars and professionals from heritage institutions to critically review research directions and course curricula on film heritage. Embracing the concept of “epistemic disobedience” (Walter D. Mignolo), Blinken OSA Archivum and Visual Studies Platform at CEU offer a platform to collaboratively explore the heuristic value of new methodological paradigms in film history and visual studies.

We are happy to announce the next presentation of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event online by following the link below! The presentation will be held at 11:00 a.m. on Monday, June 26, 2023, online. The Zoom link of the meeting is:https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/99369362814?pwd=ZXgrbG05RFh3NDZYVGU3dkF1V1NzZz09