How can art cope with over-politicised public spaces in the post-communist countries? – a Hungarian perspective

In Hungary – and more broadly in the Eastern European, post-communist countries – we cannot talk about art in public space without having a deeper look into how public spaces have been formed and transformed by the legacy of the communist era and the different, often authoritarian regimes that emerged in these countries after the fall of the iron curtain and are used, what are the specifics of public spaces in the region.

Two elements can be mentioned which have characteristically shaped the ways of using public spaces starting from the communist times through the following regimes in the past 2 decades. On one hand, public space has been the platform and façade for the authoritarian and dictatorial (oftentimes xenophobic, racist, homophobe, nationalistic) propaganda as well as the manipulation of the big narratives. On the other hand, people have not felt comfortable with (or even have been afraid of) gathering in public space, as it was forbidden to congregate on the streets during the communism, and it indicated something “suspicious” in the eyes of the authoritarian regimes.

If we take a closer look at Hungary, the former government led by Viktor Orbán for 16 years radically changed the cityscape and the public spaces of Budapest:

• symbolically: they rebuilt the most emblematic squares of the capital, before all the one in front of the parliament, by (among others) replacing some well-known historical statues by monuments from the fascist era of the country (under Miklós Horthy, regent of Hungary during the II World War who aligned Hungary with Nazi Germany);

• architecturally: by giving unconditional permission, supporting and even initiating real estate investments of circles close to the government and personally to Orbán – these constructions very often destroyed natural ecosystems or historical buildings;

• on a narrative level: the billboards of all sizes in cities, villages, along highways (by 2025 a significant portion of outdoor / public-space advertising surfaces, estimated by the industry at around 70–80%, has been owned and controlled by business circles close to the government and companies dominated by state contracts) constantly proclaimed the propaganda and the narrative of the government, based on a massive and effective method of creating enemies (mostly migrants, “Brussels” meaning the EU, LGBTQ+ people), invoking the threat of war and praising the government’s achievements;

• mentally and emotionally: the above-mentioned, mostly visually but also verbally aggressive propaganda had a serious effect on people’s mental health (even if we couldn’t have necessarily realised it).

Furthermore, the Fidesz-regime gradually built and reinforced a society characterised by distrust or untrust (by constantly repeating that one can’t trust anybody else but the government) and eroded critical thinking by increasingly resorting to open threats in an attempt to silence critical voices – first and foremost those of the free media, but also lawyers, activists, teachers and professors, and last but not least artists.

A third component should be mentioned which completes the picture: any artistic-cultural project (especially those emerging from the independent art field and those taking place in public space) that expressed critical opinion on the regime has been deprived of public funding. As a result, they were able to realise only smaller-scale projects. At the same time, the government organised huge, spectacular, propagandistic and (public-)money-burner events (the best examples are the nationalistic, patriotic, simplistic and self-explanatory parades held on the 20th August, Hungary’s national holiday).

This is the public space in Hungary where art – ideally – should / could appear, make an impression, have an impact. Our festival, PLACCC (as well as the very few other initiatives, organisations and institutions which presents art in public space, such as Trafó – House of Contemporary Art, Budapest Gallery, the public art initiative of the 9th District Municipality) have chosen to realise small-scale, but participatory projects and / or collaboration with smaller, local communities, thus instead of huge audiences we target a more specific group of participants and aim at achieving deeper impact. One reason for this choice is obviously financial: with our minimal budget we are not in the position to invite and present big-scale spectacular projects for larger audience (with some exception like the invitation of Willi Droner’s Bodies in urban space in 2018). The other, more important reason is that, over time, we started to feel that we simply “cannot afford” to present projects that are not political, that do not attempt to resist and protest.

In case of the smaller-scale and more targeted performances we constantly face the doubt and struggle of reaching only our own bubble. Artistic projects when we tried to bring political-social question more directly into the street and to a wider audience have often met with failure (which we haven’t considered a failure of the projects themselves, but much more a failure of the system and the Hungarian society). For example, Lotte van den Berg’s and Daan 't Sas’s Building Conversation in 2013 aimed at inviting the passers-by to discuss a seemingly simple question: If we could build something together here, what would that be? almost only foreigners and tourists were open to answer the question and engage in the conversation. Almost 10 years later, we presented the participative installation Pig by Kaleider and Seth Honnor which tackled the question of direct democracy by giving people the opportunity to decide what should happen to a certain amount of money collected in a large transparent piggy bank standing in the middle of a square, but the passers-by literally did not believe that they could have a say in the decision-making, that they can have the right to decide…

On the other hand, projects which didn’t aim to foster critical reaction on an intellectual level, but more on the emotional level, proved to work better. For example, the Egyptian dancers Shaymaa Shoukry and Mahmoud el Hadad towards the end of their piece The Resilience of the body managed to mobilise the entire audience (composed of both intentional and random spectators) who joined them in a long, exhausting run around a basketball court as a gesture of collective resistance.

Photo: Pig © Attila Balogh

Fanni Nánay

Hungarian cultural manager, curator and theatre critic, and co-founder and artistic director of PLACCC Festival, an international festival dedicated to site-specific art and artistic interventions in public space in Budapest. She holds a PhD in Theatre Studies and has a background in Hungarian and Polish Philology and Multicultural Anthropology. Alongside her curatorial work, she works as an independent cultural manager and theatre critic.