This exhibition evokes the world of prisons in the Rákosi and early Kádár eras, as well as keylocales and the modus operandi of the communist dictatorship. The exhibited photographs,the installation, the documentary films and the artefacts of detention highlight and reflect onthe former internment camps, prisons, interrogation rooms and trial spaces, which are linkedto personal lives, human tragedies and survival stories. The exhibition focuses on the periodbetween 1945 and 1963, from the establishment of the communist dictatorship to the so-called ‘great’ amnesty. Making it their subject, presenting it with historical accuracy andreflecting on it with a contemporary mindset, the artists seek to find out how it was possible tosurvive savage persecution and imprisonment while preserving human dignity. It isillustrative of the scale of terror that in 1950 alone, some 10,000 people were convicted onpolitical charges. In the same year, 2500 people were interned in Kistarcsa and Recsk, and by1953, over 5000 people were held captive in camps across Hungary without trial. Around 300people were executed in the darkest years of Rákosi’s dictatorship, while in retaliation for the1956 revolution, 230 were given the death penalty, over 20,000 were imprisoned, and 13,000were interned.
The locales featured in this exhibition are both well-known and unfamiliar. The tangledbarbed wires of the prison in Gyorskocsi Street ; the parched ground of the Recsk labourcamp; the corridor of the prison on Conti Street; the wall of the prison on Markó Street, castin half shadow; the impenetrable cell doors that close out everything and create completeisolation—they still exist today, yet we hardly feel their historical burden. The photographs ofDániel Kovalovszky, the films made during the tours of the buildings and the related historicaldata, as well as the photo-based contemporary installation by Balázs Hugyecsek, give voice,colour and weight to these places, which float in our memories. The places are empty, theprisoners are absent, yet every detail bears the memory of violence. The human stories thatthe dictatorship tried to erase appear again in the viewer’s imagination.
Topotéma is a public project of the Historical Archives of the State Security Services,dedicated to the spaces used by the Hungarian political police between 1944 and 1990 and thephysical setting of its operation. Five films available on its website are shown here, andtogether with the other filmic material, they broaden the historical and spatial context of what is presented by the photographs.
The cell doors and bunk placed in the exhibition space transform the world of prisons into aconcrete, physical experience. They are engaged in a dialogue by Balázs Hugyecsek’sinstallation, Decisions, which contrasts the dictatorship’s closed and violent locales withpositive spaces. The details of basement walls, printed on mirrors, the eight photographs ofhand gestures and the programmed lighting create a mysterious, continuously changing space.The gestures, which refer to different decisions, are outlined in the central, empty field byflashing lights, whose reflections are scattered on the walls, the ceiling and around the bunk.
What the exhibition drives home is how easily an individual could disappear overnight in thesystem of show trials and internments. Therefore, more than mere documentation, this displayis also visual remembrance work.
With great dedication, the creators delved into the penitentiary system of the Rákosi regimeand the early Kádár era, the world of show trials, the suffocating solitude of prisons andforced labour camps. The historians’ research, the individual lives revealed, and the placesvisited and exposed turn this exhibition into an important memento.
The portraits of the survivors invest the places with individual characters. The faces of theseelderly people appear against a neutral background, removing them from the settings of theirformer sufferings. Their eyes reflect trauma and the experience of survival. The recollectionof István Válóczy, a former convict, evokes the most elementary perception of freedom.Other stories make the cruelty of the system tangible: the brutality of interrogations, thedegrading prison conditions, the predetermined sentences. ‘I sentence you to lifeimprisonment, though you’re fit for the gallows,’ said Judge Gusztáv Tutsek at a trial, offeringa succinct characterization of the dictatorship’s justice system.
The exhibition becomes a space of collective remembrance. Over and above documentingevents, it reminds us that history is not a concluded piece of the past, but a presentresponsibility.