2013

Don - A Tragedy and Its Afterlives | January 12 - March 3
Seventy years ago, on January 12, 1943, the Hungarian army’s defensive positions by the Don River suffered the first large-scale Soviet assault, which was followed within a few days by further attacks. Lacking sufficient provisions and equipment, Hungarian troops were only able to resist Soviet tank charges in an organized fashion for a couple of days. Over the next two weeks, the Second Hungarian Army suffered grave losses: its formation collapsed, many units were surrounded and wiped out, while the remaining bulk of the army abandoned heavy artillery in an attempt to escape the encirclement.
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2012

On the Ground 1989-94 | September 18 - November 4
Rodolf Hervé's Photos and Videos.
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Kádár 100 – In His Own Words | May 31 - July 29
Historical exhibition on the 100th anniversary of the birth of János Kádár.
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Dead Library – Books Unread | February 28 - April 22
The Dead Library exhibition is an experiment in modelling holdings of Hungarian libraries that have not been read since 1989.
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2011

Surveillance Photo | September 20 - October 30
The initial idea came from The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague. The researchers of the Institute compiled a selection of photographs from the records of the former Czechoslovak state security services, and created an historical exhibition on the basis of these records.
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Generation Z | June 9 - July 20
Russian pioneers of sound art and musical technology in 1910-1930.
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Building CEU | March 10 - December 31
The exhibition presents a history of CEU through its structures, tracing the separate stories of the Monument Building (Festetics Palace, 9 Nádor Street) and the Open Society Archives (Goldberger House, 32 Arany János Street) from their construction to the present day. The final segment lays out current plans for campus redevelopment against a backdrop of thought-provoking visualizations of some of the never implemented designs for the main university buildings.
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2010

Subjective Budapest Maps | October 20 - December 2
The last two decades have brought wide-ranging changes in the life of Budapest: in the wake of the social and economic transformation that was brought about by the transition to democracy, urban and social space has been restructured. During the transition, the emergence of the private sector and the infusion of foreign capital radically altered the city.
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Restoration • Northern Transylvania, 1940 | August 30 - October 10
The Second Vienna Award fundamentally influenced the two countries' roles in World War II, and has been a source of tensions and unresolved traumas in the memories of both nations ever since. In 1940, by the decision of the Axis powers, primarily Hitler-led Germany, Northern Transylvania including Székelyföld was restored to Hungary.
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Srebrenica - Exhumation | June 2 - July 2
"In a criminal investigation it is the forensic stuff that tells the story so compellingly... the science in it is frankly quite spectacular." (Louise Arbour, former Chief Prosecutor, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia)
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KOPIRÁJT | April 10 - May 19
The exhibition was open on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne, the first fully-fledged copyright law in the world to come into effect.
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2009

The Great Flood in Fehérvár 2 | November 5 - December 4
"At that time I didn't know that it would be as if it had not been at all ... That's what life was like, so humiliating and ambivalent."
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ESSL AWARD CEE 2009 | May 22 - June 10
The ESSL AWARD CEE 2009 is dedicated to the discovery and support of young creative talents in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia. The ESSL AWARD CEE 2009 aims to support artists who are still in training.

ÓVÁS! (PROTEST!) | April 28 - May 12
Anyone who is walking on the streets of the old Jewish quarter of Pest, a World Heritage site under UNESCO protection since 2002, may get the impression that the war has just ended. They see vacant plots, deserted apartment buildings, abandoned business venues, decaying architectural monuments, the facades and frontal sections of partially demolished buildings, recently built apartment blocks resembling housing estates, ghost houses and passages, and the yawning entrances of underground garages.
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Chachipe Youth | March 17 - April 18
In November 2008, the Open Society Institute and OSA Archivum announced an online photography contest entitled Chachipe Youth.

 
2008

Etikoppaka | December 2 - December 23
Touched by the Mahatma. An Indian Village Inspired by Gandhi.
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Barbara Klemm: 1968 - photos of a revolt | October 16 - November 7
25 photos about the student movements of West Germany.
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Secession and Magnetism - The Effects of 1968 on Contemporary Hungarian Art | September 9 - October 5
The exhibition is intended to shed some light on the influence that the ideas and movements inspired by the events of 1968 exerted on Hungarian art. The concept was developed by the art critic István Hajdu, who is the chief editor of the magazine Balkon and also the curator of the present exhibition.
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The Trial | June 9 - June 15
The 52-hour-long, uncut audio recording of the trial of Imre Nagy and fellow defendants
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Concrete (books bound in concrete) | June 4 - June 7
Using eighteen cubic meters of books and two cubic meters of high-tensile concrete, János Hübler and Nemere Kerezsi, two Ph.D. students at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts (both under supervision of György Jovánovics), have created a spectacular installation. The books in question were rejects from the Radio Free Europe Research Institute’s collection, offered to the public gratis but not wanted by anyone. The books had a sad story from the start, as they were hardly ever taken off the shelves of Radio Free Europe’s library during their useful life. More indignity lay in store for them in the summer of 2007, when the general public declared them to be absolutely worthless by declining to take them home even for free.
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Aby Warburg - The Mnemosyne Atlas | April 4 - May 4
Along with Freud, Nietzsche and Max Weber, the German art historian and cultural expert Abraham Moritz Warburg (1866–1929) is regarded as one of the most important pioneers of the humanities in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Aby Warburg – "Jewish by birth, a Hamburger at heart, with the soul of a Florentine" (Warburg's description of himself) – established iconology as a new method and as a branch of art history in its own right. The library he founded, the "Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg", which encompassed some 60,000 volumes at his death, was a gift to scholarship of reference materials that are of timeless value for research on the Italian and German Renaissance.
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Archives of the Living and the Dead – honoring Carolus Linnaeus | January 31 - March 16
This is the first exhibition from the series Taxonomies, on the relationship between classification/taxonomy and the archives.
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2007

Reprints and Objects, 1973-2007 | September 20 - October 11
 

Raoul Wallenberg - One Man Can Make a Difference | March 2 - May 6
In the autumn of 1944 Raoul Wallenberg, secretary of the Swedish Embassy in Budapest, arrived in the Hungarian capital with a mission: to do everything possible to save the persecuted Jews who were trapped in the city.
about | Wallenberg's office in Second Life

 
2006

The Game | December 31 - February 11
Chess and Communism from Capri to Reykjavik. Sam Havadtoy's works in 41 steps.

Prints of Recollecions, Drawings by Endre Rozsda, Interviews with 1956 Refugees | November 4 - December 10
This year OSA Archives was granted the privilege of presenting in Budapest for the first time Endre Rozsda's extraordinary set of drawings, an artistic diary portraying everyday life in Hungary throughout the 1950s.
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Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East-Central Europe | September 15 - October 20
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.
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Ferenczi and the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis | June 15 - August 20
The exhibition presents the decades of the beginnings and evolution of the Hungarian psychoanalytical movement through the life of Ferenczi, his family, professional and private relationships, as well as the creative effect of the immigration of the Budapest School on the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, its practice and the establishment of its institutions. The exhibition pays special attention to the Stalinist era and the post Stalinist years in Hungary.
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Atom | April 26 - June 11
The occasion for the exhibition is the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe. The exhibition focuses retrospectively on the history of nuclear research and the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, primarily in the USSR and the other former communist countries. This topic was one of the most crucial, and painfully sensitive, issues of the past century and the cold war period.
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Holocaust against the Sinti and Roma and present-day racism in Europe | January 27 - March 12
The exhibition is organized by The Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma (Heidelberg) and the Holocaust Documentation Center and Memorial Collection Public Foundation.
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2005

Propaganda, Music and Noise | virtual exhibition
By Tom Bass
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2004

Russia in Close-up | November 3 - November 28
The exhibition features a parallel series of works by two contemporary artists, Lev Melihov and Alexander Sabitov. The large-format photos offer a new perspective on the people, landscapes, towns and cities of Russia, which ordinary foreigners have so far known only through images in travel guides, if at all.
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Peace and Wars | September 15 - October 28
Dictatorships, occupied countries. A photo exhibition of Normantas Paulius.
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The Divide | June 15 - August 29
Since the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000, the number of Palestinian attacks against Israelis has grown significantly. In order to prevent the uncontrolled access of Palestinians from the West Bank into Israel and thus further attacks, the Israeli government decided in June 2002 to build a physical barrier along or near the Green Line (the 1949 Armistice Line).
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Auschwitz 1945-1989 | April 23 - May 30
The reconstruction of the first two official Hungarian Auschwitz exhibits, which opened on site during the time of Communist rule in 1965 and 1980.
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6 Stalin Cities | January 16 - March 31
The exhibition is intended to give a comprehensive overview of the Eastern European cities which, mainly after 1949, were named after J.V. Stalin: Katowice, Eisenhüttenstadt, Dunaújváros, Brasov, Varna and Stalingrad, the latter named after the generalissimo as early as the 1920s. The fifties saw major construction work in both the newly created and the renamed Stalin Cities. The photos, documents and plans presented in the exhibition show the most important buildings, indoor and outdoor settings of the cities (re)designed in that period.
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2003

NDK-GDR-DDR | September 12 - November 30
Everyday objects typical of East German industrial production of the time - household plastics, radio electronics, and so-called consumer goods necessary for living - were mass-produced for millions. The exhibition is designed to present objects of material culture which represent the period from 1950's through the 1970's in the former GDR.

José Guadalupe Posada | July 11 - August 17
100 engravings of the Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada.

"05.03.1953." | March 5 - May 11
The exhibition focuses on Stalin's death, the mourning ceremony, the funeral and the fate of Stalin's remnants afterwards.
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2002

Sex and Communism | November 28, 2002 - February 16, 2003.
The exhibition - based on private and official photos, documents, movies, personal testimonies and so on - describes more than merely sexual practices.
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DPRK | September 13 - October 27
This series of photos offers rare glimpses of the world's most closed-off country. North Korea's Stalinist system is revealed, from the ritual worship of the late president Kim Il Sung to the country's current agricultural crisis.
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Forced Bathing in Hungary | June 13 - July 14
Shaving, Stripping, Public Humiliation: Disinfecting Gypsy Settlements during Socialism.
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Unerasable Communism | April 11 - May 28
An exhibition of Károly Kelemen, painter.
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International Theatre | March 15 - April 7
The exhibition presents, to a Hungarian public deprived of the possibility of having such a theatre, those significant, structurally and esthetically transparent multi-use theatre buildings that were internationally acclaimed in previous years' competitions.
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2001

The Millenary Exhibition | December 31, 2001 - February 28, 2002.
This is a summative exhibition about all the most important publicly funded millenary events, programs and works of art in Hungary. There is no commentary; the exhibit speaks for itself.
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Hungary Can Be Yours! | October 27 - December 2
Alternative country image reconstruction from 1984 - with secret police documents. In cooperation with the Artpool Art Research Center.
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Bodies in Formation | May 17 - July 29
The importance of the body and its movements for the legitimization of the communist regimes as reflected in mass gymnastics. In cooperation with the Tyrs Museum in Prague and the Czech Cultural Institute in Budapest.
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Chicago - New York | March 29 - April 30
150 black and white photographs trace the history of landmark designation in the two cities. In cooperation with the American Embassy and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
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East is Red | February 18 - March 24
The first ever exhibition of the University of Westminster collection of Chinese propaganda posters of the great proretarian cultural revolution (1966-1976) in Europe.
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2000

Type - Writer | December 4, 2000 - January 31, 2001.
International Comparative Exhibition on Samizdat Publications.
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Angkor | September 6 - October 8
Joint exhibition of Galeria Centralis and the House of Photography.
virtual exhibition

Kosovo/a | June 10 - July 14
This multimedia exhibition explores contradictory representations of the Kosovo conflict.
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The 2000 Years of Communism
Exploration of how official communist historiography, art and art policy represented the figure of Jesus and the early Christians as forerunners of communism.
virtual exhibition

The First One | May 11 - May 28
Contemporary documents of the first free elections in Hungary since 1945.

The Siege | February 13 - April 28
An exhibition about the siege of Budapest, and much more.
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1999

Expedition into the Future | December 31, 1999 - February 6, 2000.
An exhibition on how communist futurology foresaw the "brave new world" decades ago...

Vietnám & Vietnam | November 5 - December 12
The theme of the exhibition was the Vietnam War and its influence on events on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
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Past in the present for the future | October 7 - October 31
Presented jointly with the Hungarian National Archives on the occasion of the 34th annual session of the International Archival Roundtable Conference in Budapest.

The Note | July 6
A recollection of the chance event on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of a historic coincidence.
virtual exhibition

Ten years after | June 24 - August 1
International photograph and document exhibition on the 10th anniversary of the fall of Communism in East European countries.

Gulag | May 1 - May 30
The topic of the exhibition titled "Gulag" is time: the ruins of a slave empire and "glorious achievements" acclaimed in the past form an astonishing contrast in the artistic photographs of Thomas Kizny and documentary pictures from various Russian archives. In cooperation with the Karta Archives in Warsaw.
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The Commissar vanishes | March 11 - April 25
The photographic collection of David King, British art historian, art director of the London Sunday Times.

Ten years of freedom | January 28 - February 27
In cooperation with the 1956 Institute.
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1998

Freeze Frames of Communism | October 21 - December 18
A multimedia exhibition exploring the now half-forgotten medium of film strips used for propaganda purposes during the communist eras in Russia and Hungary.

Prague spring, Prague fall | September 10 - October 11
The exhibition focuses on the events in Prague in 1968, especially on the role of youth.
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IHF | June 18 - August 30
An exhibition about the 23 years of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights Movement.

The portrait of Roloff Beny | April 25 - May 25
The portrait photography of the famous Canadian photographer, Roloff Beny. In cooperation with the National Archives of Canada.

Fifty years ago it was a hundred years ago | March 12 - April 10
Different regimes have interpreted the 1848 Hungarian revolution in different ways. Communist historiography tried to exploit its populist tendencies, sometimes with bizarre results...
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1997

The art of the unofficial | October 11 - December 31
A Celebration of the Forbidden: Rebel Artists and Their Work in the Soviet Union.

 
1996

The representation of the counter-revolution | November 5 - December 1
The topic of the exhibition was the Kádár regime, from a special, but not at all a marginal point of view.
virtual exhibition