We have the honour to present the tragic case of this year’s competition for the Hungarian Pavilion. We are not going to hide the fact that we applied together, as we work together on many contemporary art projects.

Today we’re talking about procedures, and here the category of ‘one curator’ is perhaps not a sustainable one, as collaboration is nothing unusual in today’s practice - many contemporary artists work collaboratively and so do curators, even academics. Collaboration can be seen as a positive form for connectedness in the contemporary world. Even this Dokumenta is curated by a husband and wife. In Croatia for example, this is the second time in a row that an artist has been the curator of the national pavilion – both times the artist made good curatorial choices. And just to refer to our own case again, under European law, we are a registered curatorial partnership, and therefore we are a legal entity or ‘jogi szemely’.

There were several good reasons for collaborating with Csaba Nemes on the project Remake. Remake deals with the public disturbances around the 50 th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, which was just the time when we were setting up the exhibition Revolution is not a Garden Party in Trafo Gallery – that exhibition had as its background the 1956 anniversary, but dealt with contemporary artists that engage with the possibility of revolution. Csaba Nemes, in his introductory text to Remake, even refers to one of the works in the show, so this was a logical collaboration, and somehow of the moment.

Remake is conceived as a series of 10 animation films that deal with the public disturbances in the autumn of 2006 – this was the last time that Hungary made world news, so we’re convinced the project would have attracted a lot of international attention.

The project addresses the importance of 1956 in the public consciousness of this nation, but not in an exploitative way. The work is neither agitational nor political, but rather meditative and subjective. Through these 10 stories we see fragments of what was going on from the starting of the tank, to when the crowds broke into the TV building, then didn’t know what to do, so started queuing at the Turo Rudi machine. There is even a story about a skinhead and a young art historian who start a romance in the side streets near the demonstrations.

The form of realisation is animation film, and that’s not without reason. Csaba Nemes is a truly multi-media artist, from his engagement with neo-conceptual projects in the 90s, to work with photography, film, and painting. The basis for these animated films is the artist’s drawings, that are themselves based on television coverage of the events, the drawings were to be computer post-produced into short animated films.

One more reason for animated films in this case, was the artist’s wish to distance himself from the documentary realist style of films, to stress one more time, it’s not about documenting the events, but rather questioning the possibility and wish to ‘remake’ the revolution of 56. In a theoretical sense, remake draws on the form of re-enactment - there are historical re-enactments, but also re-enactments in art – and they are a very useful tool for contemporary artists to deal with the past.

As we are informed, the jury clearly recognised the potential of this project, and we just wanted to end with a symbolic sentence from our proposal for Remake:

‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’