Past, Continuous

The exhibition focuses on the relationship between the official culture of the socialist era and the contemporary artworks reflecting upon that. The idea is to pose the questions as to how this rather despised but robust legacy could be treated, what to do with the ideologically contaminated cultural heritage of this period, and how to regard the artworks of the socialist realist  ’50s and those of the Kádár era both stemming from similar ideas but representing dissimilar ways of expression. It is quite controversial how we relate to the socialist decades due to its recency directly involving our present. The attitudes towards the era alternate from nostalgia and embellishment to extreme refusal.

The main features of the exhibition consist of the diverse attitudes towards these issues: conscious abuse of symbols transmitting visual experience across generations, allusions to the cult of replication, exposure of works against suppression, and mindful strategies for processing the memory. The exhibit comprises creations of critical approach, concept ideas using visual aspects only as reference, and works processing personal biographical concerns. The invited artists coming from a wide range of generations and countries display broadly divergent perspectives.