Last Resort: The Hungarian Art on the Edge of Government Repression
Asztalos was selected in December 2012 by Mucsarnok – Kusthalle Budapest after an open call. In the meantime Mucsarnok has been placed under the control of the Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA), a private association that now controls the bulk of cultural funding and fully adheres to the extreme-right, anti-LGBT, anti-Roma, and anti-Semitic, nationalist government. According to MMA director György Fekete members should have an “unambiguous national sentiment.” The director of Mucsarnok, who had selected Asztalos, resigned in protest. In 1940 Maróti Géza, designer of the Hungarian pavilion, wrote an 600-page as yet unpublished cultural history of Atlantis. Can the Hungarian pavilion, a remnant of the previous government, take a last stance in favor of such a utopian place before being pulled into the nationalist myth in the next Biennale?
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and Jonas Staal