The exhibition, called A Story About Freedom, includes photographs by Ernő Horváth, Lenke Szilágyi, Zsolt Pataky, Ottó Zachár, Judit Müller, Martin Marencin and Harald Hauswald. It was prepared with the cooperation of Poland's Karta Foundation, the Estonian Film Archives, the Open Society Foundation, Ostkreuz Agentur Fotografen of Berlin and the Political Studies Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Events of post-communist transformation cannot be presented simply by focusing on developments in one country, Varga said. It was a process that was also foreshadowed by the 1956 revolution in Hungary and the 1968 student protests in former Czechoslovakia. "Communist dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe were like a large plinth that was destined to collapse once the first cracks appeared," Varga said.
The exhibition is set up like a row of dominoes, a symbol of the rapid fall of communist dictatorships after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It starts with the Soviet occupation of Berlin, then follows with the Berlin workers' riots of 1953, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring of 1968, the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 80s, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the reburial of Imre Nagy in Hungary, the uprising in Timisoara and the post-communist transformation of Baltic states.
The exhibition also includes a documentation by the foreign press of human rights violations committed under the regime of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
