Turning Points is a contemporary art project created together with foreign cultural institutes operating in Hungary. Twenty-six artists from sixteen countries present their analysis of history and the last century, awakening in us new, personal and emotional ideas about the past that we lived through, or which we know from listening to older generations.

The Turning Points exhibition takes as a starting point the multitude of anniversaries intensively commemorated in 2014, i.e. the outbreak of World War I and II, the democratic transformation in Central Eastern Europe, the fall of the Iron Curtain/the Berlin Wall and the historical events which followed as well as the eastward enlargement of the European Union. However, the organisers are also eager to explore the overarching nature of the twentieth century, the ideas lying behind the historical events. This is what we encourage the visitors to reflect on.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou - among others - regards the twentieth century as the shortest century, given that significant events began in 1914 and ended in 1989. European conflicts, issues of nationality, and rivalry and colonial ambitions among the superpowers led to World War I, the "Great War". Many analysts see World War II as the delayed continuation of the first, because many unsettled questions never went away, but only grew more entrenched. The sequence of conflicts that began at the start of the century and continued through the Cold War culminated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the strengthening of the European integration.

Art reflecting on historical events reaches beyond anniversaries. For artists, these are taken as a source of inspiration, an occasion that prompts ideas which can lead us to a new understanding of how things might be related.

Turning Points raises questions in between and around the mentioned dates, such as the defining nature of war, the political threats we face nowadays and their origins in the events that evolved over the last hundred years, the rhetoric, symbolism and human image of totalitarian regimes, the contrast between and the role of the two main economic and political world orders during the Cold War, and the shock resulting from the impact of the new economic system on societies of the Central Eastern European countries that regained independence after 1989.

Some works also deal with the question of remembrance: how historical events are treated by posterity, how they relate to our own personal experience, at a time when it is slowly becoming clear that the new millennium has not fully succeeded in helping humanity to transcend the heritage of the preceding century.

Exhibiting artists: Johanna Kandl, Andreas Fogarasi, Josef Dabernig (Austria), Kateřina Šedá (Czech Republic), John Timberlake (England), Kristina Norman (Estonia), Société Réaliste (France), Clemens von Wedemeyer, Alexander Roob (Germany), Shy Abady (Israel), Paolo Ventura (Italy), Motoyuki Shitamichi (Japan), Artur Żmijewski (Poland), Iosif Kiraly (Romania), Mikyta Svatopluk (Slovakia), Laibach/Neue Slowenische Kunst (Slovenia), Democracia, Javier de Villota (Spain), Istvan Balogh (Switzerland), and the Hungarian artists: Zsolt Asztalos, Zsolt Bodoni, Péter Forgách, Szabolcs Kispál, Adrián Kupcsik, János Sugár and Attila Szűcs.

Hungarian National Gallery, Building C, 3rd floor
On display until 15 February

Source: Hungarian National Gallery
Address: 1014 Budapest, Szent György tér 2.