Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives
Press Room
Posted: 22/July/2021
The Blinken OSA Research Room is open, welcoming researchers throughout the summer. Please do not forget reserving a time slot prior to your visit, bringing your Hungarian or EU Covid Certificate, and wearing a mask during your stay. For remote research, use our Digitization on Demand service.
Posted: 22/July/2021
Visegrad Call – 2021 Spring
NEW CALL - VISEGRAD SCHOLARSHIP!
Research theme within the Visegrad Scholarship at the Blinken OSA in 2021/22
Possibilities of knowing: Truth seeking in a polarized world and [in] its aftermath
We are happy to announce the next call for the Visegrad Scholarship at the Blinken OSA in 2021/22!
Submission deadline: July 25, 2021
For detailed information of the call, recommended research questions and topics, please check the official Blinken OSA Visegrad Scholarship webpage.
Posted: 20/July/2021
With the Research Room now open, winners of the 2019 and the 2020 calls for Visegrad Scholarship at OSA could begin their work. Meanwhile, deadline for the current call is within days!
Posted: 14/July/2021
On the initiative of the creator, collector, and donor of records pertaining to the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at Central European University (Blinken OSA) digitized over 8,000 pages of documents from David Rohde’s research collection, which will be donated to the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
Posted: 09/July/2021
A Weapon to Fight Denialism: the Archives Collecting Evidence on the Srebrenica Genocide
The Srebrenica Memorial Center Archive was opened today, in order to provide local access to evidentiary documents on the genocide. Blinken OSA, operating in Budapest, supported the creation of the new archives in Bosnia–Herzegovina with pro bono consultancy work and archival donations.
Posted: 02/July/2021
On the occasion of the 26th Budapest Pride Verzió brings you the latest documentary of Mari Takács.
(no English subtitles are available, the film is available on-site and online as well)
IN PERSON at Blinken OSA Archives
Date: July 7, 2021
Time: at 6:00 p.m.
Venue: Budapest 1051, Arany János u. 32.
The screening is followed by a discussion with the director and the two Hungarian protagonists, Csaba Hegedüs and Benjamin Forest Török as well as Dr. Miklós Fischer sport psychologist.
Moderator: Flóra Dóra Csatári, journalist, telex.hu
Please note that the number of seats is limited.
Entry is free of charge but your Hungarian immunity card and an ID card/passport must be presented before entry.
Pre-registration is required at this link: https://forms.gle/LVHDtm3TDewj1Uym8
Posted: 28/June/2021
Based on our recent experiences, we considered it necessary to endorse the Guiding Principles for Safe Havens for Archives at Risk, and to make it available to Hungarian professionals also in Hungarian.
Posted: 28/June/2021
Blinken OSA is happy to announce that the 2020 Annual Report has been released in digital format. The Annual Report gives an in-depth view of the diverse activities of the Archives.
Year 2020 was marked by a tragic worldwide pandemic that fundamentally changed the way the Archives could operate. Contrary to the many challenges, significant archival processing work was done, the teaching activities of our colleagues continued online, exhibitions were opened both on-site and online, new acquisitions arrived, films were screened, new curated collections became available, school programs were reorganized online, and colleagues pursued their academic activities in the form of online conferences, workshops, and publications.
Posted: 17/June/2021
On the Night of the Museums, the Blinken OSA, together with Partizán, will address the night of the museums: the current conditions of public collections in Hungary.
Can we talk about endangered public collections in Hungary? On June 26, in a temporary studio set up in the Blinken OSA, the YouTube Channel Partizán will welcome public collection workers and experts to talk about the current condition of museums, archives, and libraries in Hungary. During the past decade, the Blinken OSA has become a safe haven for endangered collections. Visitors to the Archives can attend house tours focusing on the endangered collections preserved here.
8.00–12.00 p.m. The night of the museums. Partizán live from the Blinken OSA. Details soon!
4.00–12.00 p.m. House tours every two hours.
Posted: 09/June/2021
Colleagues participate in a week-long training program as volunteer instructors for the Potočari Memorial Center.
June 9 is International Archives Day adopted by the International Council on Archives (ICA ) at the International Congress in Vienna in 2004. ICA strongly believes that “Archives and archivists play an important role in accountability, transparency, democracy, heritage, memory, and society.” This is the day to celebrate archives and the Blinken OSA joins in the celebration by offering support to the Potočari Memorial Center in the form of professional training.
Csaba Szilágyi, acting Chief Archivist of the Blinken OSA Archives has written a powerful blog post, titled Discussion About the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide Begins in the Archives.
In the closing paragraph of the article he writes “Since December 2019, on behalf Blinken OSA, I serve as a pro bono archives consultant for the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery, assisting in designing and establishing a proper and long-needed archive and research center on the study of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. Digital copies of some of the records listed above will be transferred to the PMC Archives.”
This ongoing consultancy work is now complemented by a week-long archival training program designed and carried out by the professional staff of the Blinken OSA, who will act as volunteer instructors during the online training. The training covers a wide range of topics that serve as the base for professional archival operation in a digital—and very much changed archival climate.
Posted: 03/June/2021
The Blinken OSA has recently formed a teaching cooperation with the Media Design program at the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design (MOME), widening the spectrum of earlier teaching courses. In the second year of the new partnership, MA students took part in a special fall course of the 2020/21 academic year.
We are happy to announce that the MOME students have put together an online exhibition based on the projects they had produced during the course.
Initially, the students of the fall semester could personally take part in the archival creative process, study original documents onsite, and were inspired in an authentic archival environment.
You can find the exhibition: https://hiddenlayers.osaarchivum.org/
Posted: 28/May/2021
The Budapest Week was the first independent English-language weekly in Hungary, founded in March, 1991, by Rick Bruner, Steve Carlson, Richard W. Bruner, Tibor Szendrei, and Blake Steinberg. Peter Freed financed the paper from 1992, and remained its owner until the Budapest Week ceased printing around 2000.
Thirty years have passed, and the founders of the Budapest Week contacted the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives to launch a common project, and to help to digitize, process, and host the first four years of the Budapest Week, with the aim of preserving and celebrating the legacy of this newspaper. Further steps were taken to gain permission for its online publication from the legal copyright holder Peter Freed, who was willing to help.
The Blinken OSA and two of the founders, Steven Carlson and Tibor Szendrei, partnered up to look for documents, testimonies, interviews relating to the early years of the paper, as well as the photo documentation of those years.
We are happy to announce that forty-three paper boxes of photos have been deposited at the Archives by Peter Freed. Thematically arranged, the photo archives of the Budapest Week also represents the turbulent but promising years after the regime change in Hungary, thus serving as a rich documentation for the researchers of the time.
Posted: 10/May/2021
A variety of Blinken OSA exhibitions are available online. including the recently opened Order and Dreams.
More than a year has passed since the pandemic broke out, seriously altering the course of our lives and professional operations. The impact of this new era has left lasting effects, as our institution adapted to the new challenges. One prime example is the public program series of Blinken OSA, finding ways to attract new exhibition audiences online—with the closure of the Galeria Centralis—, which did seem a real challenge at first.
While many of the Hungarian museums and galleries are opening, the Galeria Centralis remains closed till further notice.
Posted: 29/April/2021
The John Wesley Theological College and the Eötvös Lóránd University Faculty of Social Sciences co-organized a memorial conference of Mihály Csákó sociologist, educational researcher, a democratic opposition member from January 31 to February 1, 2020.
Two colleagues of the Blinken OSA, Iván Székely and Miklós Zsámboki gave lectures at the conference. The lectures given at the Mihály Csákó Memorial Conference by Blinken OSA colleagues are now available on the Blinken OSA YouTube channel.
Iván Székey argued in his presentation that contrary to the Post-Modern forecasts and the visions of internet service providers, archival institutions won’t be unnecessary in the future, and he also added that the rich legacy of Mihály Csákó will soon be processed and available at the Blinken OSA.
Miklós Zsámboki presented an educational project during his lecture, where high school students had discussions with their parents about their memories of 1989, and he proved that the official state narrative and private memory remain vastly different.
Posted: 27/April/2021
In 2019, the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University, which runs the Cultural Heritage Studies Program, and Blinken OSA signed a Letter of Intent proposing that research work conducted by the students and faculty of the Cultural Heritage Studies Program should be preserved and made available to researchers at Blinken OSA.
Our new archival fonds HU OSA 437 Digital Archive of Cultural Heritage is the result of this cooperation.
Posted: 23/April/2021
The third edition of OFF-Biennale Budapest opens today both online and offline! Five weeks of contemporary art around the most burning topics of our times.
The online exhibition titled ORDER AND DREAMS - The context of the poem “A Breath of Air!” by Blinken OSA and the OFF- Biennále Budapest also opens tonight.
Link to the exhibition: https://orderanddreams.osaarchivum.org/en
The opening: April 23, 2021, 8:00 p.m. on Facebook
Tonight the organizers of OFF-Biennále Budapest are presenting an online opening event in Hungarian, but you will be able to follow the program of OFF in English as well with many international events in the upcoming weeks! Stay tuned!
The link to the live Facebook event.
Posted: 22/April/2021
Date: October 14-16, 2021
Place: Blinken Open Society Archives, Central European University (Budapest), Hungary
The workshop aims to contribute to the discussion on knowledge practices in times of reflexive disbelief by addressing the role of scholars with regards to different truth regimes. Michel Foucault once remarked that the analysis of “truth” should go beyond the evaluation of isolated statements: truth regimes are power systems which produce and sustain certain truths in a circular way, through political and economic institutions. William Davies of “The Guardian” traced back the current popular skepticism vis-à-vis professional expertise to a paradigm shift in truth regimes: the immediacy of self-revelatory data has been replacing, through a multitude of revelations, leaks and informational wars dating as far back as the Cold War, the interpretative work by experts and journalists. It is worth re-assessing, from this point of view, how historical knowledge about the past can be used to address and carefully interpret facts and events reported or produced by those very informational wars before 1989, when the East and West were systemically opposed. In an era when individuals and academic communities are increasingly divided over matters of common concern, we consider it the duty of both historians and archivists to engage in a more reflexive manner with the problematic nature of records of the past.
Posted: 21/April/2021
CEU’s statement on the Hungarian Government’s proposed amendment of the Act on National Higher Education.
The Full Statement
Vienna, April 20, 2021 -- A new bill has been submitted to the Hungarian parliament amending the National Higher Education Act. This follows a ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) last October that ‘lex CEU’ violated European law.
The government’s proposed new law changes nothing for CEU. We believe the government has no intention of creating the conditions in which international institutions like CEU can operate freely in Hungary. Under the new draft legislation, it remains a political decision—certain to be taken at the highest level—whether to allow foreign universities to operate. The government has already made it perfectly clear how it proposes to use its powers. It threw out an institution that abides by international standards of academic freedom and has invited instead a university which obeys the ultimate authority of the Chinese Communist Party.
These are the choices the government has already made. CEU will remain in Austria, a country where basic standards of academic freedom are respected. We will maintain a non-teaching, research presence in Budapest and will never abandon the city, but we will not subject ourselves again to the political whims of one man and his regime.
Posted: 16/April/2021
We are sad to share the information about the recent passing of a great colleague and archivist Charles Kecskeméti. One of the first Western professionals whose work contributed greatly to the professional establishment of our Archives, as well as its recognition on international levels, by acting as a professional at the same time informal advisor to the Archives.
Posted: 15/April/2021
The American Refugee Committee (ARC) was among the first foreign NGOs to respond to the refugee crisis in former Yugoslavia. As soon as Bosnian and Croatian refugees started arriving on the Dalmatian coast, ARC dispatched public and mental health specialists to ease their situation and alleviate their pain.
Fonds HU OSA 363 documents ARC’s work in former Yugoslavia (except Slovenia), and Albania, between 1992 and 2007. It consists of textual, visual, and audio-visual materials. Textual documents are, for the most part, grant and project files showcasing ARC’s dedicated reconciliation and reconstruction work, which was, at times, truly innovative. Numerous maps indicating ARC operations and refugee movements in the region add to our understanding of the complexity of the situation ARC intervened in. Photographs, slides, and videos show the destructions of war, but also local and expatriate ARC staff as they deliver their humanitarian service to the refugees of the region.
Posted: 14/April/2021
The context of the poem “A Breath of Air!”
The third edition of OFF-Biennale Budapest, INHALE!, takes the seminal political poem “A Breath of Air!” by 20th-century Hungarian poet Attila József as its starting point. The poem was written in November 1935. Apparently, it was a time of peace and plenty: Europe—and Hungary—had overcome the crisis of the Great Depression; the order was restored. But what kind of order was it that the poet “didn’t dream of”? The research and exhibition project presents the political and social context of the poem through archival materials, while contemporary artworks offer its possible 21st-century reading.
The exhibition was organized by the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives and the OFF-Biennale Budapest.
artists: Daniel BAKER, Vesna BUKOVEC, Krisztián KRISTÓF, Damir OČKO, Tamás PÁLL, Kata SZIVÓS–Dominika TRAPP–Noémi VARGA
curator: Katalin SZÉKELY
research: researchers of Blinken OSA
exhibition design: Virág BOGYÓ
venue: ONLINE
date: April 23 – May 30, 2021
partners: Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival
https://offbiennale.hu/en/2021
Posted: 09/April/2021
Digitization is an essential method in supporting remote research possibilities in a vastly changed era.
Libraries and archives are resuming their services in some parts of the world, but Europe is still hard hit with the pandemic. This reason and the very fact that our mother institution, the Central European University (CEU), has moved to Vienna inspired colleagues to come up with a solution that would help to diminish the distance between researchers and our collections.
The idea put to the test is a new service introduced a few weeks ago called Digitization on Demand. It is designed to help researchers to use the unique resources the Blinken OSA could only offer onsite now online as well.
More detailed information about how the service operates: https://www.osaarchivum.org/research-room/digitization-on-demand
Posted: 25/March/2021
New Summer University Course organized by the Open Society University Network and Blinken OSA
Titled Confronting the Crisis of Expertise: Historical Roots and Current Challenges, the SUN course will take place online between July 26 and 30, 2021.
Offered to advanced-level undergraduate students, graduate students, junior faculty in humanities and social sciences, journalists, and artists, the research-intensive course is planned to be organized on-site in Budapest; if the pandemic is still posing health risks, the course will be held online. The course will comprise lectures, seminars, and practical workshops with archival documents and scientific datasets.
Co-funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN), in cooperation with the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives.
Course Director(s):
Ioana Macrea-Toma
Posted: 24/March/2021
For the joint exhibition of the Blinken OSA Archives and the Háttér Archive and Library, we researched documents that inform us how the societies in the former Eastern Bloc, SFR Yugoslavia, and Albania, shaped and constrained the lives of LGBTQI+ communities, and also how the latter were raising their voices in the public sphere. To include as many different voices from the LGBTQI+ movement as possible, we welcome contributions! You may lend or donate textual and audiovisual documents and (photos of) personal effects connected to the history of LGBT+ persons in Central and Southeastern Europe in the period 1945–1999.
For more: https://bit.ly/2P5aUri
Posted: 22/March/2021
The online exhibition, a joint project of Blinken OSA and the Háttér Archive opened on February 26, 2021.
Records Uncovered is an online exhibition by the Blinken OSA and the Háttér Archive, which presents the divergences and commonalities among gay and lesbian movements in Central and Southeastern Europe in the second half of the last century. Through legal documentation, media reports, private and institutional correspondence, artworks and ephemera, this exhibition evinces the understanding and treatment of homosexuals, in countries that commonly shared two different political goals at two different periods: the establishment of a new Communist society between the mid-1940s and the early 1990s, and the transition toward a democratic society in the following years.
Posted: 18/March/2021
The recorded sessions of the online conference are available on YouTube!
“Labor Research from Planned Economy to Savage Capitalism” was the title of a workshop conference organized by the Research Documentation Centre / Voices of the 20th Century Archive and Research Group together with the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in December 2020. The event was held online, the recordings are now available on the Blinken OSA YouTube channel.
Posted: 10/March/2021
The Blinken OSA has recently added new series to the subfond Western Press Archives, including biographical series and subject files.
The Blinken OSA has recently published a catalog of several series of Radio Free Europe’s Western Press Archives. The subfond contains newspaper clippings from Western press sources, news agency releases, but also brochures on thousands of personalities worldwide and on subjects relating to the East European target countries, including various topics from Agriculture to Prisons and Youth.
Posted: 04/March/2021
From study trip to escape room: a digital education program.
In 2019, the Blinken OSA (CEU) received a grant for its project titled 89: Bringing it Home from the U.S. Embassy in Hungary, supporting the design and organization of two-day study trips for five groups of 15–19 year-old students to the Archives. The program aimed to create a unique learning experience focusing on the regime change in Hungary. On the first day, students would participate in a simulation game that recreated the dynamics of the Kádár regime, using primary sources; they would then have a walking tour that familiarized them with some of the most important events of 1988 and 1989. On the second day, students would form a “Creative Block” to express—through a diversity of workshops—their views on what they considered the most important takeaways of the trip.
Due to the outbreak of the COVIC-19 pandemic, only one of the five planned trips could be realized. Therefore, in October 2020, the Blinken OSA began redesigning the project to offer a similar learning experience, but this time online, making the program available for many more students even during the pandemic. The plan was to roll out a set of learning aids that would help teachers in exploring the era with their students in an interactive and immersive fashion.
Posted: 16/February/2021
Audience favorites from the most recent Verzió available for limited-time streaming.
Every spring, some of the best films from the Verzió Festival are rescreened at the Blinken OSA. This year, due to the pandemic, the films are made available online on the Verzió website. Audience favorites from the 17th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival will be available from February 15 through April 30, in the frame of Re:Verzió. The fifteen films cannot be found elsewhere in Hungary, and for most, it may be their last chance to be viewed.
Tickets for these films are free of charge, or can be purchased for a symbolic price. All ticket sale proceeds will be used to purchase the rights for I Am Greta, for educational purposes and film club screenings. These films are only available for streaming within Hungary. Hungarian subtitles will be provided for all non-Hungarian-speaking films. A limited number of tickets are available for each film. When fewer than 100 tickets are left for a given film, viewers will be notified via the Verzió's Facebook page.
More information can be found at https://www.verzio.org/
Posted: 12/February/2021
The prize is assigned by The PLURAL Forum for Interdisciplinary Studies, a nonprofit organization based in the Republic of Moldova.
Anastasia Felcher, the Slavic Archives Specialist at the Blinken OSA, has been awarded the PLURAL Local Archives & Collections Research Prize. The prize is assigned by The PLURAL Forum for Interdisciplinary Studies, a nonprofit organization based in the Republic of Moldova, which aims at initiating and carrying out analyses and discussions of phenomena and social issues neglected or distorted in the public space, such as inequality, oppression, identities, cultures, power, and ideologies.