ORDER AND DREAMS

The third edition of OFF-Biennale Budapest, INHALE!, takes the seminal political poem “A Breath of Air!” by 20th-century Hungarian poet Attila József as its starting point. The poem was written in November 1935. Apparently, it was a time of peace and plenty: Europe—and Hungary—had overcome the crisis of the Great Depression; the order was restored. But what kind of order was it that the poet “didn’t dream of”? The research and exhibition project presents the political and social context of the poem through archival materials, while contemporary artworks offer its possible 21st-century reading.

Beside the favorable economic indicators, the era was full of tensions: World War I and the subsequent peace pacts made the peace of the continent very fragile. The economic crisis swept away the political status quo; extremists came to the fore in many countries. In Germany, the National-Socialists came to power, and Italy was led by the Fascist Party. By that time, the Abyssinian war was well under way, and the German leadership was about to blow up the Locarno Treaties. In the meantime, the first show trial of the “Great Purge” in the Soviet Union took place almost simultaneously with the passage of the Nuremberg laws; however, the threat of war and terror only appeared on the horizon of few.

The political and social tensions of Hungary were also disguised by a relative economic prosperity. Even so, the increasingly urgent problems still ensued on peaceful weekdays. Many solutions and programs were proposed to meet the challenges of the era—some of them made by artists who were dreaming of a more just and free “order.” A world where individual freedom, social justice, and cultural freedom win over political considerations and agendas, and where fresh air is blowing freely.

The exhibition is presented online due to the regulations related to the global pandemic. The online format gave us the opportunity to present our research in a much more extensive way than the limited gallery space would have permitted. In this way, the exhibition became somewhat of a primer on the political and cultural trends of the 1930s in Europe. On the other hand, the contemporary contributions also had to be adopted to the requirements of an online presentation. Covid, in a way, had a huge impact not only on the format of the exhibition, but also on its content. When OFF-Biennale in 2020 had to be canceled (again, because of the pandemic), we didn’t know what kind of new layers of meaning would be added to our 21st century reading of the poem, which is also reflected in our selection. Yet, we fully acknowledge that the selection didn’t go global, like the disease, and our research only focused on the main events happening in Europe (with a brief look at the United States). After all, the original context of the poem, and the perspective of its author, Attila József, was—for the most part—also limited to the European continent.

The exhibition was organized by the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives and the OFF-Biennale Association.

The exhibition is publicly available only until May 31, 2021. After that date, the archived online exhibition is available for research at Blinken OSA Archivum.