Curatorial Positions in Central and Eastern Europe II

Interview with Curator and Researcher Eszter Szakács

Eszter Szakács moved from Hungary five years ago to participate in a doctoral program in Amsterdam; however, her decision was also greatly influenced by the dismantling of the Hungarian cultural institutional system for political reasons. Eszter has been a member of the curatorial team for the OFF-Biennale on several occasions and has also participated in organizing biennales in Kyiv, Kassel, and Budapest. In 2025, she served as guest curator for the 41st EVA International, and she has just completed her six-month term as interim director of the de Appel Amsterdam art institution. She has also worked as an editor and educator, and in recent years has been active in the lumbung network that emerged in the wake of and alongside documenta fifteen. We spoke with Eszter about curatorial work, her professional career, and the interconnectedness of regions.

What motivated you to become a curator, and how did curatorial work become your profession?

Actually, I ended up in this profession by chance. I studied art history and American studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and it just so happened that I completed my 120-hour museum internship at the Műcsarnok. At that time, in 2008, Zsolt Petrányi was still the director, and I was assigned to work alongside Hajnalka Somogyi as a curatorial assistant. Hajni was then participating in a curatorial training program at Bard College in the United States, and the Műcsarnok invited her as an external, independent curator to organize an international group exhibition. Since she was spending most of her time in America at the time, she needed a local assistant, and that’s how I got the job.

The exhibition was titled Try again, Fail again, Fail better; it was an ambitious international group show, so everything had to be organized very seriously, and I had no choice but to learn to swim in deep water. Lívia Páldi was also working there, and after the exhibition she asked if I’d be interested in joining the exhibition organized for the 50th anniversary of the Béla Balázs Studio on a project basis, to which I said yes. I was so captivated by this profession that I even wrote my thesis on the history of curating in Hungary after 1989, a field that hadn’t been documented anywhere at the time.

How would you define curatorial work, and what makes for good curatorial work?

I think this is incredibly difficult to define, so I’d rather start with what inspires me. For me, the most rewarding type of curatorial work is the kind that truly starts from scratch: when you have to not only come up with the theme of an exhibition but also figure out how to realize it from professional, political, and organizational perspectives.

I’ve probably learned the most from projects like these. I realized that it’s not enough to simply focus on the themes we’re working with; the methodology of organizing the exhibition is just as important. Over time, it has perhaps become even more important to me than the content itself to work on how to create the conditions under which something can be created on as communal a basis as possible. I learned this primarily while organizing the OFF-Biennale, and to this day it remains a defining part of how I work as a curator. In fact, I often see myself not as a curator, but rather as an organizer.

Another very important aspect for me is the question of power dynamics. I’m always very sensitive to this, because the curatorial position is in itself a position of power. I try to mitigate this somehow, for example by building things collaboratively whenever possible, because I believe that the power inherent in the curatorial position must be distributed in some way. A good example of this is the Irish biennial, EVA International, where I was a guest curator. I didn’t want to follow the biennial’s usual curatorial program, which typically arrives with a pre-determined theme; even in my proposal, I emphasized how I would work together with EVA International’s existing team.

In fact—unlike in previous editions—I invited the EVA International team to participate in the guest program of their own biennial so that we could create this exhibition together. For me, this approach—and similar ones that involve others—is very important, something I learned in part from Dóra Maurer’s work as an organizer. As I see it, she sought to use her own position to create opportunities for others.

So can we say that curatorial work is difficult to define because it constantly takes shape through relations? Or that it’s best when the curator doesn’t arrive at the project with a pre-established toolkit, but is instead able to “invent” solutions time and again through connections with the participants?

Yes, and space is also fundamentally decisive—both in a geographical and institutional sense. Organizing a biennial in Sharjah is completely different from doing so in Budapest: the same curatorial knowledge, skills, and conditions do not apply in these two different contexts.

What challenges does a curator—let’s call it that—who was raised in a post-socialist country face when working on international platforms?

Yes, let’s say I was socialized in a post-socialist environment, but I actually started working right at the beginning of the Orbán regime. Before that, I worked as a curator’s assistant; then, from 2011 to 2020, I was at tranzit in Budapest, and during that time I was also active in the OFF team. For me, what was truly formative was that I actually got to see what the institutional system was like before it collapsed like a house of cards—and, of course, what followed afterward.

What really sank deep into me because of this was the crazy work pace back home and a strong sense of responsibility. Which, of course, stems from my personality, but perhaps also from the fact that I lived—and still live—with the belief that nothing can be taken for granted, that often we can only count on ourselves. If there’s no money, we’ll still find a way. Because of this, I sometimes feel out of place in other environments where conditions are more balanced.

The other huge difference is the issue of financial resources. Moving from a resource-poor environment to a resource-rich one is a completely different experience. Of course, in the Netherlands, budgets are tight—and there are indeed cutbacks—but there’s still funding for culture, and the infrastructure is very good. Obviously, this is a welfare society with a colonial historical background, and that’s reflected in the cultural institutional system as well.

What unexpected sacrifices did moving away from Hungary require?

I’ve been living in the Netherlands for five years; that’s not such a long time, yet a peculiar liminal state has developed within me: I’m not Dutch, but at the same time, I no longer feel quite at home in Hungary either. Obviously, I consider myself Hungarian—there’s no question about that—but over the past five years, I simply haven’t lived there, I haven’t participated in daily life, and I’m increasingly aware of this. I’ve distanced myself from being involved in events there on a daily basis. The most recent election brought this home to me very sharply. I watched Partizán’s election coverage, followed Péter Magyar’s campaign and his tour of the country, and read the news, but at the same time I was strongly struck by the feeling that this just wasn’t the same. Even though I followed all of this online, through Instagram posts or news articles, I wasn’t physically present, so the events passed me by.

And of course, there’s also the fact that I moved to the Netherlands partly because of the Orbán regime. The realization that I was physically absent from this historic moment—a potential regime change—even though I’d tried to do everything I could in recent years, was painful. An irreplaceable loss. I went to vote, of course, but I wasn’t really there. Meanwhile, I was filled with the desire to be there too: on the street, in the crowd, celebrating and reveling with everyone else.

In the Netherlands, I see that curatorial work is organized much more along thematic, specialized lines, and this makes me wonder what my own field actually is. In the past, I would have more easily said the Hungarian art scene, but since I haven’t physically participated in it in recent years, that’s no longer so obvious. Of course, I’ve also gained experience and developed new practices elsewhere, for example here in the Netherlands. Still, partly because of the elections in Hungary, I’m currently experiencing this as a strange transitional phase, and for now I don’t know exactly how things will unfold.  Despite all this, my plan is still to stay here.

Before you moved, you worked at tranzit.hu in Budapest. Based on your experiences there—or perhaps elsewhere—do you think there is a genuine professional network in Central and Eastern Europe?

At tranzit, the Central and Eastern European connection was a given, since the institution itself is built on this regional network. Beyond that, one of the most important examples for me was the East Europe Biennial Alliance (EBBA), which I also consider very significant, as it is a bottom-up collaboration that sought to build on a genuine community of interests. In addition to the OFF-Biennale, the Kyiv Biennale, the Warsaw Biennale, and the Riga Survival Kit Festival were also members, and the goal was not merely to exist as parallel institutions but to form a genuine alliance. In recent years—mainly as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war, but also due to other changes—this network activity has subsided; however, it is also true that, due to my relocation, I was unable to follow its most recent developments.

I believe there is a genuine Eastern European professional network; we just tend to underestimate it. I believe that such an organization is significant, though perhaps we need to articulate more clearly what specific knowledge or experience this Eastern European network can contribute to the global art discourse. I think the question is not only whether this community exists, but also how it can make its position visible on an international level.

You previously taught in the art theory program at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and also worked as an instructor at de Appel. What does the ideal curatorial training institution look like? What conditions are necessary for a good educational system to be realized?

As a lecturer at the Academy, I taught the history of curating for a while—the very field I wrote my thesis on. I’d rather answer this question based on my own experience. Between 2017 and 2019, I completed a curatorial training program at the University of Bergen. I think this was the real curatorial educational experience for me; it was here that I truly understood what curatorial learning means to me.

The program was led by Anne Szefer Karlsen, and I think she structured it quite fantastically. It wasn’t based on lecture-style teaching, but on peer learning; everyone worked on their own project, but at the same time, the others had to be constantly involved: commenting, reflecting, and contributing to each other’s work. This way, we not only learned how to view our own projects critically, but also how to engage with others’ work in a meaningful and constructive way.

Another defining element of the program was that we worked in an international setting and actually traveled to each other’s hometowns—such as Nairobi, Budapest, Lofoten, and other cities—to experience the local artistic and social context firsthand. On these occasions, it was always the student whose city we were visiting who was tasked with organizing the program. During these visits, we essentially had to curate a program that truly showcased the artistic and social context of the given location. When they came to Budapest, for example, I took them to the House of Terror, and I even requested a special guided tour, it was fantastic, precisely because of its controversial nature. We also had seminars during our trips, which Anne organized.

I only joined Appel later, following several other events. In 2023, I worked with them on Dóra Maurer’s exhibition. In 2024, the so-called Lumbung Practice program was launched as a collaboration between the Sandberg Institute’s temporary postgraduate program in Amsterdam, the Appel curatorial program, and the Gudskul collective learning program in Jakarta—a program open not to individuals but to collectives. This two-year program, which is still ongoing and will conclude this summer, addresses extremely exciting questions. I am participating as a lecturer (tutor) in this program.

You’ve worked at various biennials in Kyiv, Budapest, Kassel, and Limerick. What good practices did you take away from each of these venues?

The OFF-Biennale was invited to participate in documenta fifteen in 2022, which was curated by the Indonesian group ruangrupa. I first experienced the lumbung practice they implemented through the OFF-Biennale as part of documenta fifteen. The lumbung “collected” in Kassel subsequently became one of the most defining curatorial and organizational mindsets for me. This originally stems from an Indonesian agricultural practice. There is a communal rice granary where everyone deposits the surplus after the harvest, and from which anyone can take what they need—based on a collective decision—when necessary. Ruangrupa transplanted this model into cultural practice. The focus here was on how to create quasi-institutional structures based on shared resources, collective decision-making, and long-term sustainability.

In Limerick, however, I was much more concerned with how to carry forward the experiences of the lumbung. As I mentioned earlier, instead of the classic guest curator model, I proposed a collaborative structure: I didn’t want to explore the Irish art scene from the outside, but rather to involve the institution’s own team, knowledge, and practices in the curatorial process (as well). I didn’t view this as a one-time guest curatorial role, but rather as a potential long-term collaboration. This proved so effective that we later continued it at Appel as well: when I had the opportunity to organize an exhibition, I once again invited the EVA International team to jointly create a project—partly reflecting on the Irish art context—that is still ongoing.

I wouldn’t say I was deeply involved in the work in Kyiv; rather, I became part of the process through the connection between the OFF-Biennale and the East Europe Biennial Alliance. This was a fairly strong Central and Eastern European collaboration in which we sought to create a genuine alliance. The invitation to the 2021 Kyiv Biennale also came from this connection; the goal was for the East Europe Biennial Alliance to be visible in a curatorial capacity as well. But it wasn’t a situation where I was on-site, building the biennial day by day, because it was actually the work of Vasyl Cherepanyn and Serhiy Klymko; their organizational skills held the whole thing together. I was present more in a supporting role.

What was it like to organize a biennial in Ukraine in 2021, right before the war broke out?

I visited Kyiv several times, and for me it was a very powerful and defining experience. I was there during the biennial’s closing weekend in November 2021, and I didn’t have the feeling that a full-scale Russian military invasion could happen at any moment. It only became real in hindsight, after I had returned home and spoken with Ukrainian artists and colleagues.

How can a practice like lumbung, which comes from a completely different culture, be embedded into a European system with its own long-standing traditions and ways of operating? Did you encounter any resistance from the institutional system?

I think documenta fifteen very clearly showed where the breaking points of these processes lie. To me, the conflicts surrounding this edition of documenta stemmed fundamentally from the fact that an extremely hegemonic institution like documenta, while attempting to open up thematically toward decolonization and seeking to incorporate this discourse into its artistic program, actually faced truly serious resistance when decolonization ceased to be merely a theme and became a practice—that is, when it began to demand changes at the level of institutional operation. At the level of representation defined by documenta, this openness was still acceptable, but when it would have entailed a genuine shift in power and structural rearrangement, this triggered alarm bells.

Dóra Maurer passed away this past February, so you were one of the last curators to work with her in 2023 on the exhibition titled SUMUS – We Are Together. To what extent did you get to know Maurer during that time?

I actually began working with Dóra Maurer in connection with my doctoral research. That was partly why I moved to the Netherlands: I applied for and received a doctoral position in the Imaginart – Instituting Otherwise: Art, Politics and State Transformation research group. This group examines how artists and cultural actors can operate in places where there is no stable state infrastructure, or where the state acts in an explicitly repressive manner—Hungary is a good example of this. Our research focuses on how institutions, communities, and functioning structures can be created in such environments. Within this framework, my dissertation focuses on practices in Hungary, examining Dóra Maurer’s curatorial work and SUMUS as historical examples, and the OFF-Biennale, documenta fifteen, and lumbung as contemporary examples.

What became truly important to me about Dóra Maurer was not primarily her artistic work, but her organizational activities. Surprisingly little is said about this, while her pedagogical work or her life’s work has been much more thoroughly studied. What interested me was how, together with Tibor Gáyor, she created opportunities for those conceptual and abstract artists who, in the 1970s and 1980s, under state socialism, had hardly any space for visibility. This project came to fruition at Appel precisely because there was a historical connection: Dóra Maurer had participated in Appel’s 1979 exhibition Works and Words, which introduced Eastern European artists in the Netherlands. This provided an opportunity to link Appel’s own institutional history with Maurer’s story.

Unfortunately, I was only able to speak with her in person on a limited basis during the course of my work. Her gallery, Vintage, was a tremendous help. I deeply regret that I didn’t start exploring this topic sooner. That is precisely why it is particularly important to me to be able to at least partially process this story and place it within an international context.

What will be the most important art events of the year that you would recommend to Kontur Magazine readers?

I’m curious about the Venice Biennale in several respects, and I have rather ambivalent feelings about it. On the one hand, I’m very interested in what kind of central exhibition Koyo Kouoh—who passed away last year—had envisioned, and how his curatorial team was ultimately able to realize it without her. On the other hand, there is the very strong political tension that has arisen around the participation of Israel and Russia. I’m also very curious about Skulptur Projekte Münster, organized by the Croatian curatorial collective WHW. It’s also an exciting question for me to see what they will create within a German institutional setting and how they will be able to operate their own critical and political practices in this context.

Cover image: Portrait of Eszter Szakács. (Photo: Fransisca Angela)