After reading descriptions of anti-Semitic pogroms and lynches that had taken place in the Hungarian countryside, I realized that there is no clear boundary between pre- and postwar events. Indeed, why believe that prejudice and hysterical anger suddenly dispersed after the fall of the Nazi regime? The forming, new political system is rather unstable, lacking a solid set of values. People’s longing for a new start is permeated with anxiety and repression. Emotions need a mere spark to set everything ablaze once again.

The story of the Kunmadaras pogrom is particularly complex and diversified. Locals—destitute and worn—are provoked with mad, absurd accusations, and follow their worst human instincts and inherited prejudices when they attack their innocent fellows. It’s almost impossible to grasp the way events triggered one another.

Paraphrasing Paolo Uccello’s Breaking Down the Jew’s Door, a painterly adaptation of another utterly absurd anti-Semitic story, I made a series of drawings. These images stick to the original’s visual and spatial structure, yet they are completed with different history and the art history references, also recalling the Kunmadaras events. This is done through motives like the egg, the red star, the merchants, the portrait of one of the agitators, the goods wagon at stand at the station, the main square of Kunmadaras with its WW1 memorial, or the details from paintings by Kitaj and Malevich. 

Because Something Will Happen There, 2017, 9 pieces of 43.5 x 65 cm, mixed media, paper