Entanglements of art and memory activism in Hungary’s illiberal democracy

This paper explores how art contributes to the articulation of memories that counter the official historical narrative of Hungary’s self-proclaimed political and ideological system, illiberal democracy. Amid deepening polarization between Europe’s post-colonialist and post-socialist countries, the Hungarian government promotes a Christian conservative national identity against the “liberal” values of Western Europe. Systematic appropriation of historical traumas is at the core of such efforts, which largely manifests in removing, erecting and reinstating memorials, as well as in the re-signification of trauma sites. Insufficient civic involvement in rewriting histories generates new ways of resistance, which I demonstrate through the case study of a protest-performance organized by the Living Memorial activist group as a response to the government’s decision to displace the memorial of Imre Nagy in 2018. I seek to understand the dynamics between top-down memory politics, civil resistance and art within the conceptual apparatus of the “memory activism nexus” (Rigney 2018, 2020) and “multidirectional memories” (Rothberg 2009). I argue that artistic memory activism has limited potential to transform the dynamics of memory in a context where a national conservative political force has gradually taken control over historical narratives, triggering inevitably polarizing responses in the society. Although profoundly embedded in local histories, the case-study may offer new ways of negotiating traumatic heritages through the entanglement of art and memory activism.