One of the principal effects of the widely perceived loss of certainty, security and safety in the destabilised “risk societies” in which we now live, has been a widepread retreat into regressive forms of “closure”– whether at a national or local level.
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Traditional ideas of home, homeland and nation have been destabilised, and the electronic landscapes in which we now dwell are haunted by all manner of cultural anxieties which arise from this destabilising flux.
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Paul Rosdy, the young Austrian documentary film director, went to rediscover the region that was shattered just as it entered the time of modernity. His film New World (Neue Welt) is a richly photographed journey surveying the successors of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy across Central Europe.
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The question of identity preoccupies Imre Kertész in almost all of his writings. By analyzing certain aspects of his fiction and essays, I try to show that, according to Kertész, the Holocaust experience rendered its victims not only fateless, but identity-less as well - though it also gave the survivors what existentialists called a "terrible freedom".
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Many of today’s significant jazz personalities in the East had already asserted their originality during the time of repressive regimes in their respective countries.
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"Objects do not simply outlive us, they also preserve for posterity our knowledge and our culture," says Birkás. In his works, objects serve this very purpose.
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Jazz in the 21st century will be a universal musical phenomenon, or it won't exist at all.
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In the European countries that were subjected to the decade-long trauma of totalitarianism, jazz acquired the aura of martyrdom, the symbolism of underground resistance.
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Rosocha's works prove that in contemporary art the traditional division and differentiation between 'pure' and 'utilitarian' art have very little or no sense at all. In his case, 'pure' art is sublimated into 'utilitarian' forms.
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I think that we, Romani painters, have to look for and try to invent something unique and undetachable from Gypsy/Romani identity, something that can be found or put in the visual arts. In my work I have been trying to develop something different, something new. But you have to decide for yourself how far or how close I have come to that goal.
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To call this European region Central sounds ironic, and avant-gardes expressed this irony by attacking nation-building cultural ideologies inherited from the nineteenth century. They were marginal both by being avant-garde and by being Central European.
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In February, a multilingual portal called Babel-matrix was launched on the world wide web. At present, the site offers access to outstanding pieces of Hungarian literature in the English, Czech, Dutch, Polish, German, Russian and Portuguese languages. This, however, reveals next to nothing about the ultimate objectives of the website.
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A daring, provocative exhibition of a group of young Polish artists who challenge the traditional concepts of motherhood in an unusual and often (self-)ironic way.
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The whole of our world is a little bit second hand, a little bit second rate. This also means that we lack the insensitive arrogance which characterises new things. After all, nothing could be sadder than a novelty which we know will be useless before it grows genuinely old. - An interview with Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk.
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What is transformed by the years: the picture, the model or both? Where is the self: is it manifested in presence or do I construct it through my images and stories? - An exhibition by young Central European photographers in Hungary.
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Cultural globalisation is a very complex process that is very likely to change the relative weights of "American culture", "European culture" and "Asian culture" in the future. More specifically, it brings about challenges as well as chances, and it will also lead to the emergence of one global civilisation.
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During the last war, shrines, such as mosques, Catholic and Orthodox churches, were among the main targets of destruction in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the present paper I am trying to identify the links in the chain that might provide the criteria required for such destruction.
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In 1991 Jurij Andruhovich wrote: "Ukraine is not yet living in its own cities." Several years later he added: "Today my expectations are much more pessimistic, and I really doubt the children of my children will be the inhabitants of Ukrainian cities."
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This is a portrait of Katarzyna Pollok, the famous Roma artist, who lives in Berlin. She is a great adventurer, a nomad, who--metaphorically speaking --travels from one culture to the other with an easy grace, fantasy, and the restless playfulness of the artist.
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The compilation of largely unpublished photographs presented here could only be seen previously by those lucky enough to have been present at an exhibition in the Eötvös Club, Budapest in May of 1986.
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