Stalin cities on exhibit
By Anita Brkanic

Galéria Centralis plays host to an exhibition entitled “6 Stalin Cities,” organized by the Open Society Archives. The exhibition aims to give a extensive overview of Eastern European cities which, primarily after 1949, were named after J.V. Stalin: Katowice, Eisenhüttenstadt, Dunaújváros, Brasov, Varna and Stalingrad, the latter named after the generalissimo as early as the 1920s. A great deal of construction took place in both the newly established and the renamed Stalin Cities. The exhibition provides a rare opportunity to study the photographs, documents and plans that show the most essential buildings, indoor and outdoor locations of the cities (re)designed in that period. The exhibition covers works by artists who were greatly renowned at the time but their talent goes largely forgotten these days.

These include Aurél Bernáth, Sándor Ék and Endre Domanovszky. Visitors will also get the opportunity to look at various excerpts from fiction and documentaries that add extra features to the rather asymmetrical illustrations of everyday life displayed in present-day propaganda. “What was being built there was, however, a monumental enterprise. It was the first time such a thing had ever happened in Hungary: building up a whole district, bringing in the construction workers, starting to build the factory while developing the city itself then expanding the factory still further; all this had a very strong romantic touch to it. (...) We had no idea at the time that the whole thing could have been built better and in a more suitable location, in a different way - the huge crowd of people gathered there was incredibly exciting. The whole of society was represented, from the dregs to the upper crust - for instance, whole trainloads of prostitutes were brought in from Budapest and the excavator sometimes dug up the corpses of babies (...). It was a bit like the gold rush,” said writer István Örkény in his memoirs dating back to the 1970s.

6 Stalin Cities
From January 16 through March 31, 2004
Galeria Centralis
Nádor utca 11
1051 Budapest
Phone: 327-3250
Fax: 327-3260
E-mail: archives@ceu.hu
Website: www.osa.ceu.hu/galeria