Hungarian Art Rebels

As Hungary’s hard-won freedom of speech goes under threat, we went to Budapest to see how creatives are fighting back

Taken from the May Issue of Dazed & Confused:

In 2011, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán amended the country’s constitution to bring in sweeping new laws that allow his ruling party, Fidesz, to shut down media outlets it deems to be biased, without discussion or vote. Last December, ten thousand people took to the streets of Budapest to protest against far-right party Jobbik’s proposed plans to issue a list of “dangerous Jews”. While far-right movements in Greece and Spain have been widely reported on, those in Hungary remain largely overlooked, and yet the situation is perhaps more worrying. Far-right attitudes in Hungary aren’t confined to an angry but essentially immobilised working class, but are being implemented by powerful members of the intelligentsia.

Like any self-respecting ex-Soviet territory, Budapest greets visitors from its airport with a fanfare of billboards displaying half-naked women and offering directions to fastfood outlets. On the drive from the airport we pass a seemingly infinite array of hulking concrete tower-blocks, broken by the occasional gypsy camp, industrial park or storage container. On entering the centre of town, where war-wounded architecture lines the vast boulevards and doorways strewn with bullets from the 1956 revolution front Venetian-style buildings, things get more complicated.

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