Press Room - 2023

December 13, 2023: Visegrad Scholarship at OSA Presentation
Posted: 11/December/2023
We are happy to announce the next presentations of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online! The presentations will be held at 11:00 on Thursday, December 13, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. 
 
International Federation of Persons with Physical Disability (FIMITIC)
Posted: 10/December/2023
December 10 is Human Rights Day, observing this year the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This milestone celebration comesis just a week after the UN’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities on December 3. On this double occasion, we are happy to announce that the records of the International Federation of Persons with Physical Disability have been included to Blinken OSA Archivum’s holdings, marking a significant expansion in our collection focus.
 
Letter invitation from Romani Union to journalist Anna Koptová from former Czech
Posted: 30/November/2023
We are happy to announce the next presentation of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online! The presentations will be held at 11 AM on Thursday, December 7, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. 
 
Blinken OSA Archivum catalog
Posted: 19/November/2023
Budapest is celebrating the 150th anniversary of its unification today. The Blinken OSA Archivum, a unit of CEU, has been operating in Budapest since 1995. During this time, our colleagues launched projects like Budapest100, Fortepan, or the Yellow Star Houses website. For the capital’s 150th birthday, we have prepared several gifts. Today, we unveil our renewed online catalog, also including two new, Budapest-related collections: the archive of Budapest Week, a weekly magazine capturing the vibrant life of Budapest in the 1990s, and István Bartók’s street photographs of Budapest in the 2000s. Next week, the Verzió Film Festival, founded 20 years ago by the Archivum staff, devotes a special section to documentaries about the city.
 
Mihály Csákó (1941–2019)
Posted: 19/November/2023
Mihály Csákó would have celebrated his 82nd birthday today, on November 19. We are pleased to announce that, with archival processing done, the Mihály Csákó Personal Papers are now accessible in the Research Room, and its detailed catalogue entry can be browsed online! The rich collection revolves around topics like sociology of education, research on apprentices, democratic civic education, computerization in schools, trade union movements and, at the same time, Csákó’s democratic opposition activities and teaching work.
 
Blinken OSA Archivum invites applications for the Digital Archivist position
Posted: 16/November/2023
The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (Blinken OSA Archivum) at Central European University (CEU) based primarily in Budapest, but with teaching tasks in Vienna, Austria invites applications for the Digital Archivist position.  Blinken OSA Archivum is part of Central European University (www.ceu.edu), one of the most multinational graduate institutions in Europe, engaged primarily in the humanities and social sciences. The Archivum is a complex institution of memory that supports scholarship, is engaged in research, is the initiator of high visibility public programs, and manages the Archives and Evidentiary Practices specialization at the History and Legal Studies Departments at CEU. The Archivum is also an “archive of last resort”, the archive of (politically and otherwise) endangered collections. Blinken OSA Archivum hopes to attract a unique intellectual who is ready to experiment and to take calculated professional and intellectual challenges; who is passionate about new archival and library theories, technologies, trends in digital media, digital humanities, and open access; and who is highly knowledgeable about emerging IT solutions.
 
Where are we headed? Verzió 20 – November 22-29, 2023
Posted: 15/November/2023
Why do violent and sometimes deadly initiation rituals persist in the Belarussian army? What did the Taliban do with $7 billion worth of American military equipment? Who owns the ocean depths? What makes someone male or female? These are some of the questions explored at the Verzió Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, held from 22–29 November, in Budapest and six other cities across Hungary.
 
Gyula Konfár: Resistance in the Camp (Prisoners of the Concentration Camp), 1965
Posted: 12/November/2023
Blinken OSA Archivum, Galeria Centralis September 14 – December 3, 2023 Exhibition opening: September 14, Thursday, 6:00 p.m. (The event is held in Hungarian.) Opening remarks by: István Rév, Director, Blinken OSA Archivum Eszter Susán, Program Manager, Jewish Life Program, Tom Lantos Institute Opening speech by: András Kovács, Professor, CEU Jewish Studies Program Curator: Daniel Véri Graphic designer: Sarolta Ágnes Erdélyi, Hajnalka Illés Exhibiting artists: Tibor Barabás, Gyula Hincz, György Jovánovics, János Kass, Béla Kondor, György Konecsni, Gyula Konfár, József Péri, Endre Szász
 
Photo: Lenke Szilágyi
Posted: 10/November/2023
A pan-European survey on access to archives, commissioned by the Council of Europe, identifies novel challenges and outlines opportunities for improvement. Iván Székely, Senior Research Fellow at the Blinken OSA Archivum, played a key role in the study, and co-authored its Summary Report, now available online.
 
Photo: Budapesti Corvinus Egyetem / Michael Daramola
Posted: 07/November/2023
We, members of the CEU Democracy Institute, the CEU Institute for Advanced Study and the Blinken OSA Archivum, express our solidarity with Dr. Zoltán Ádám, recently dismissed from his position as associate professor of economics at Corvinus University. Justice for Dr. Zoltán Ádám!
 
Fortepan / Budapest Főváros Levéltára. Levéltári jelzet: HU_BFL_XV_19_c_11
Posted: 27/October/2023
The Audiovisual Unit of the Blinken OSA Archivum has started archiving the films of the Hungarian–Soviet Friendship Society. The hundreds of reels of Soviet propaganda and educational films saved by György Gadányi after the 1989 regime compose an extraordinary collection of historical documents, which will be accessible to the general public.
 
Visegrad Scholarship at OSA
Posted: 26/October/2023
In the context of the current wars, many analysts have proclaimed the end of Pax Americana, bringing about tectonic geopolitical shifts and either the final conclusion or the confirmation of the Cold War and its dichotomies. The Blinken OSA Archivum in Budapest, Hungary, invites researchers, journalists, and artists to reflect on the Lessons from the Cold War by taking cues from the Archivum’s collections, one of the world’s largest holdings on the history of the Cold War and of human rights violations.
 
31.08.1980, Wroclaw, Poland. Strike at the tram depot. (Archiwum Fundacji Ośrodk
Posted: 26/October/2023
We are happy to announce the next presentations of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online! The presentations will be held at 11:00 on Wednesday, November 15, 2023, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. 
 
Contested Memories: Antifascism, Jews and the Holocaust
Posted: 12/October/2023
This roundtable discussion explores the various ways the Holocaust was represented in Cold War Central Europe, considering major examples of official memory politics, exhibition histories, fine arts, and literature in the 1960s. It considers the agency of state actors, the Jewish community, as well as individuals, especially artists and writers, paying special attention to the eminent role played by the antifascist historical narrative. OSA Archivum’s current exhibition offers a starting point for the discussion. Titled “Commissioned Memory. Hungarian Exhibitions in Auschwitz, 1960/1965,” it introduces a monumental fine arts collection commissioned for the 1965 Hungarian exhibition in Auschwitz, as well as an exceptional work from 1960 (‘Vampire Hitler,’ based on Simon Wiesenthal’s 1946 drawing), created for the same venue.
 
(Photo: Lajos Erdélyi)
Posted: 12/October/2023
Lajos Erdélyi’s unique legacy has been donated to the Blinken OSA Archivum. Its backbone is a collection of some 20,000 photographs documenting everyday life and art in Transylvania between 1950 and 1990. The photographic negatives, sound recordings, and manuscripts found their way to the Archivum thanks to the family and the intermediaries who worked to preserve the legacy.
 
The book cover of In Visible Presence Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos
Posted: 04/October/2023
The Book published by The MIT Press is an absorbing exploration of Soviet-era family photographs that demonstrates the singular power of the photographic image to command attention, resist closure, and complicate the meaning of the past.
 
(Photo: Peter Lorenz)
Posted: 20/September/2023
The Blinken OSA Archivum offers undergraduate and postgraduate academic courses and specializations to Central European University (CEU) students, organized in cooperation with the departments of Legal Studies and History, and for CEU’s annual Summer University (SUN). The Archivum's teaching staff, commuting between Budapest and Vienna, have been fully directing or co-teaching mandatory historiography courses or seminars on the uses of archives, history writing, and legal issues. Underpinned by the Archivum’s holdings, the lectures address the historian’s craft, truth, and objectivity, and study human rights issues and related cinematic and evidentiary practices.
 
Source: Hungarian National Museum
Posted: 03/August/2023
The exhibition and book project introduces completely forgotten yet exceptional works of art exhibited at the first Hungarian exhibition in Auschwitz in 1960 as well as a monumental fine arts collection commissioned for the 1965 permanent exhibition at the same venue. With the addition of the earliest Hungarian artworks dealing with the Roma Holocaust, the current exhibition highlights the absence of the issue from the 1960s shows.
 
Still from the film “Unfinished Spaces” (2011) / AJNA Films and The Room
Posted: 02/August/2023
The closing event of the exhibition Cuban Architectures: The Third Space will commence with a curatorial guided tour (in English) at 5:00 p.m., which will be followed by a screening of the award-winning documentary Unfinished Spaces, starting at 6 pm.
 
Manuel Copado, Solimar Building, La Habana. © Cuban Heritage Collection, Univ
Posted: 31/July/2023
The exhibition Cuban Architectures: The Third Space explores, through the lens of architecture, the antagonistic context that has characterized Cuba from the decades before the Cuban Revolution to the present day. The exhibition aims to create a Third Space where conflicting ideological narratives can meet and engage in dialogue. By walking through the presented materials, visitors can construct their own interpretations of the complexities of Cuban history and its present.  
 
Stock illustration from Shutterstock.com by Great Pics Worldwide
Posted: 21/July/2023
We are happy to announce the next presentations of the “Visegrad Scholarship at OSA”. Join the event in the Archivum, or online by following the link below! The presentations will be held in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. at 11:00 AM on Wednesday, July 26, 2023. The link to the Zoom meeting is: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/91954357162?pwd=cGRQZi9GZ2JpWWQ3eUZUM1NFS2FDdz09
 
Photo: Lenke Szilágyi
Posted: 19/July/2023

On June 28–30, 2023, the Blinken OSA Archivum, together with the CEU Visual Studies Platform, organized and hosted the international workshop RE:FOCUS. Film Heritage Through the De/Post/Anti-Colonial Lenses. The workshop brought together film scholars and professionals from heritage institutions to critically review research directions and course curricula on film heritage. Exploring film studies’ epistemic foundations critically and comparatively, the participants focused on the heuristic value of new methodological paradigms in visual studies. At the center of the debate were critical methodologies’ potential for eliciting new research questions that challenge implicit hierarchies and incorporate non-Eurocentric perspectives.The workshop was accompanied by a series of film screenings and fostered cooperation between teaching institutions and initiatives beyond academia. Full workshop program is available here. The workshop was organized with the support of the CEU Conferences and Academic Events Fund.

 
17 July, 2023: Visegrad Scholarship at OSA Presentation
Posted: 14/July/2023
We are happy to announce the next presentation of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event online! The presentation will be held at 11:00 AM on Monday, July 17, 2023, online.
 
IUFU Summer School panel discussion at the Blinken OSA Archivum
Posted: 05/July/2023
The second IUFU Summer School, taking place in Budapest, July 2–10, 2023, provides Ukrainian students with the opportunity to discuss, with globally renowned scholars, issues like national canon-building, and develop strategies to valorize Ukrainian culture. The summer school also includes the exhibition Unissued Diplomas open to the public at CEU, and a panel discussion at the Blinken OSA Archivum on archival Cold War records on Ukraine.
 
Éva Kapitány Photo Collection @BlinkenOSA
Posted: 30/June/2023
We are happy to announce the next presentations of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online! The presentations will be held at 11:00 CET on Thursday, July 6, 2023, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online.
 
RE:FOCUS
Posted: 30/June/2023
The workshop brings together film scholars and professionals from heritage institutions to critically review research directions and course curricula on film heritage. Embracing the concept of “epistemic disobedience” (Walter D. Mignolo), Blinken OSA Archivum and Visual Studies Platform at CEU offer a platform to collaboratively explore the heuristic value of new methodological paradigms in film history and visual studies.
 
János Kornai awarded Honorary Doctorate by CEU (HU OSA 203 Records of CEU)
Posted: 29/June/2023
János Kornai was an internationally acclaimed expert of Socialist economies and post-Communist transitions. His collected professional correspondence now donated to the Blinken OSA Archivum, spanning from the 1960s to the 2010s and covering the entire globe from Hungary to the US and to China, will serve as a fundamental resource for economic research and for the future János Kornai Research Institute.
 
Photo credits: Markin Pavel, Photo Archive of the magazine 'Ogoniok' / Kommersan
Posted: 26/June/2023
We are happy to announce the next presentation of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event online by following the link below! The presentation will be held at 11:00 a.m. on Monday, June 26, 2023, online. The Zoom link of the meeting is:https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/99369362814?pwd=ZXgrbG05RFh3NDZYVGU3dkF1V1NzZz09
 
La Habana, © Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gab
Posted: 22/June/2023
Friday, 23 June 2023, 5 p.m. UNFINISHED SPACES Professional program of the exhibition Cuban Architectures: The Third Space Discussion with the architects Choy-León, Film screening of Unfinished Spaces (2011)   During the accompanying professional program of the exhibition Cuban Architects: The Third Space, the Choy-León architects will give a presentation on contemporary Cuban architecture in Spanish (with English translation). After the presentation, the event will be opened up to welcome all participants to a professional reflection and exchange of ideas. The discussion will be followed by a screening of the award-winning documentary Unfinished Spaces, starting at 7pm.
 
Photo: HU OSA 300-1-8 RFE/RL Public Affairs Photographic Files
Posted: 12/June/2023
The call for applications for the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA is now open! Submission deadline for the 2022/2023 academic year: July 25, 2023