Opening remarks by András Zsuppán

In the late 1990s, my parents – Budapest intellectuals nostalgic for rural life and especially for the lost peasant culture, and longing for their own garden – bought a weekend house in Piliscsév, about 35 km from the capital. Csév was then and remains on the border between the urban agglomeration and the real countryside: a little too far to be clearly called a suburban area, but already too close to be called a village.

Yet, it was a village, and in the center, at a V-shaped crossroads, stood a large, flat, shabbybuilding, as is usual in almost every Hungarian village. It faced the street with barred windows, and you could enter through a barred metal door. Above the door was an inscriptionfrom the 1970s: “Restaurant”. It shows our naivety that we took this seriously – until our first visit – and were amazed: A restaurant in Csév? Is that commercially profitable? Do they really serve hot food?

Only the bartender was more surprised when we asked her the latter question. Of course, they didn’t serve any hot food, the building was a pub: a kind of cooperative pub from the Kádár era, with a gray metlachi stone floor, a paneled counter, and sparse furnishings. It closed down not long after, but this caused no shortage, because there were other pubs in the village, four at one point in the early 2010s. There is still no restaurant today, although there was a place that offered frozen pizza at one time. There was no demand for it.

Csév is far from the poverty of those villages in Heves county where Zsófia Sivák’s photographs were taken. However, its pubs could be included in her series without further ado. The fairly popular Josti, located a few houses away from the old cooperative restaurant (I see now on an old photograph that it self-declared itself a „fast food restaurant” – what werethey thinking?), Nehéz Járom (which means “heavy yoke”), Singer Pub („Founded 1973”) and Mónika Pressó (this is its authentic spelling: ss and ó) may all have closed by now, although it seems that Josti’s anonymous successor still had some life in it last year.

When Zsófia Sivák documents a disappearing world in her pictures, this is not only true of the village pubs of her native county in Northeast Hungary, but also of a fairly suburban settlement which still has a growing population. We know from Klaus Pichler: the same fate awaits the Viennese tap rooms and cellar pubs. In his photos, we see surprisingly familiarplaces. The worn-out furniture, the illuminated light-box beer advertisements, the marble-patterned PVC-coated counters would have been not out of place in Heves, or in the seedy pubs of Budapest that are also quickly disappearing. Just like the people, who are no less worn-out than the furniture: the faces shaped by decades of alcoholism, the missing teeth, the tattoos.

It is an old debate which countries belong to (Eastern) Central Europe. Since the Second World War, as the development of the countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain took different directions, the East-West division has rather determined our thinking. Vienna is west, Hungary is east – but seeing the photos of Klaus Pichler and Zsófia Sivák side by side, the concept of Central Europe also makes sense again, and not only in the context of Austro-Hungarian nostalgia or Biedermeier porcelain, but also in a much rougher, more everyday layer of life: these are the same pubs and these are truly the same people.

In most of the pictures there is something that resembles the unjustified exaggeration of the former “Restaurant” sign of my village. Something that tells of old ambitions, of failed grand plans: the stuffed antelope heads on the wall, a kitschy painting depicting a mountain landscape, a boldly patterned curtain, a marble-topped café table. Once upon a time, someone wanted more: a restaurant, a stylish café, a high-quality meeting place – and then it became what reality allowed: a pub. A pub where nobody invested in new wall coverings, new tablesor a new counter for a very long time due to the unstoppable decline of the business, just as the lives of its aging guests are now nearing their final phase. Although there are more young people in Zsófia Sivák’s photos…

I wouldn’t say that the same Central European synchronicity is present in János Bödey’s and Reiner Riedler’s festival photos. Overall, my impression is that Riedler’s Austria is more western, while Bödey’s village festivals are held right next to Zsófia Sivák’s pubs. But their audience is not the same: they also include those people who would never set foot in a pub. Because when we lament the fate of these small village pubs as disappearing community places, let’s not forget the other truth: the quiet but firm contempt for the institution and its regulars. The iron-hard judgment of the village that „decent people don’t go to pubs”, in which today’s people share the opinion of their strict great-grandmothers.

The village days therefore also show the other side of the Hungarian countryside: the people who want to stay there, live a better life, and prosper. Those people who don’t shed a tear over the closure of the pub, which they never visited anyway, but consider it important that the wine feast, the harvest festival, the inauguration of the new playground, and the log-sawing competition are organized in a dignified manner. In a way as it were in Austria. Because from this perspective, Austria is an unattainable dream and ideal, perhaps not even the Austria of today, but the one of the never-ending 80s, when the gap between the two Central European countries was the widest.

Of course, not much of what we see in Reiner Riedler’s pictures fits into this imagined Austria. Like the America fans of the Mississippi Country Club Austria who are drinking beer under the flag of the Southern Confederacy, whose motivations for this strange use of symbols I dare not guess, or the young men queuing in front of the entrance fee zone of the Erotik-Messe Orgasmus Center. “Ultimately, this work represents the state of mind of the Austrians,” Riedler writes about his series. “It holds up a mirror to the Austrian soul.” In this respect, the parallel with János Bődey’s photos is solid: his photographs hold up a mirror to the soul of the Hungarian countryside. And when I look at his series again from this angle, I see that there is reason to be optimistic: there is still a lot of intention, energy, ambition and will in this rural society. Who knows what it will be enough for, but it is certainly not all gone yet.