Eszter Szakács is a curator,
researcher, and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Amsterdam. She has been
appointed as the 2025 Curator of the Guest Programme of the 41st EVA
International – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art. Together with Naeem Mohaiemen, Szakács
co-edited the anthology Solidarity
Must Be Defended (2023). She curated the
exhibition Dóra Maurer–SUMUS–We
Are Together (2023) at de Appel,
Amsterdam. Szakács was part of the curatorial team of the grassroots art
initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest, who were lumbung members and participants at
documenta 15 (2022) in Kassel. She was also a curatorial team member in
OFF-Biennale’s 2nd (2017) and 3rd
edition (2021), and a member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance team that
collectively curated the 4th Kyiv Biennial (2021). Between 2011 and 2020, she worked as a
curator and editor at tranzit/hu in Budapest.
The curator and researcher Eszter Szakács will speak about the
complexities of Cold War solidarity projects in art and culture, examining
their remnants from the perspective of the archive. Based on the recently
published anthology Solidarity Must Be Defended (2023),
co-edited with Naeem Mohaiemen, on visual arts projects exploring solidarity,
realised and failed, within the Cold War era, her talk will contrast
state-managed forms of solidarity organising with grassroots solidarity
projects. Szakács will examine these through the lens of several contributions
to the anthology: Hungarian propaganda publications from the socialist era
about the "Arab World”, as well as the histories of state-initiated
Pan-African festivals and artistic campaigns in Latin America.
