2011

Surveillance Photo
September 20, 2011 - October 30, 2011

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. The photographs were taken covertly in the streets of Prague, of people who supposedly belonged to or were in contact with political dissident circles.

In cooperation with the Czech Center in Budapest, OSA Archivum invited the exhibition to Budapest and decided to supplement it with similar Hungarian photographs and records. The Hungarian material for the exhibition was compiled with the help of the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, Budapest. OSA Archivum has also added some excerpts from contemporary propaganda and...

 
Generation Z - Russian pioneers of sound art and musical technology in 1910-1930
June 9, 2011 - July 20, 2011

Variophone, theremin terpsitone, rhythmicon, emiriton, ekvodin, graphical sound – just to mention a few of the amazing innovations of the beginning of the 20th century in Soviet Russia, a country and time turbulent with revolutions, wars and totalitarian dictatorship.

While the history of Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde art and music is fairly well documented, the inventions and discoveries, names and fates of researchers of sound, creators of musical machines and noise orchestras, founders of new musical technologies have been largely forgotten except, perhaps, Leon Theremin, inventor of the first electronic musical instrument, the theremin.

This community of creators, however, was inherently incompatible with the totalitarian state. By the late 1930s it became effectively written out of histories, wiped out from...

 
Building CEU
March 10, 2011 - December 31, 2011

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.

One learns from the documents that the building known as the Festetics Palace was commissioned by Antal Festetics, who entrusted Mihály Pollack with the design of the edifice. The construction of the two sections of the palace was carried out between 1820 and 1827. The building remains an elegant monument of this era. Through several reconstructions and changes in...