Works of art in minority
The representation of Hungary’s national and ethnic minorities in museums
MúzeumCafé 22.
Who we accept as part of the community and who we regard as integral members of the places where we live is in many respects revealed by the exhibitions found in museums. The displayed objects tell a story – about their periods, their history, their creators, about the people who keep them and even about those who organise exhibitions. Who are we? Which events have been determining for our community? What do we want to say about ourselves? What and who makes us proud? The questions can be easily reversed. Who are we ashamed of? What do we least like to hear about, and even not want to treat as a research subject? With the majority of museums the answers can be found in terms of objects not displayed, collections not made and in themes not examined. It is rare for an exhibition to be a space not only for display and speaking, but also a forum where viewers are stimulated to reflect and if necessary to become indignant, to dispute, to question, to examine their preconceptions and to engage in a real social dialogue. Permanent exhibitions are still dominated by static ways of thinking about national descriptions and population counts. Visitors are confronted with national costumes, folk-art creations, objects and maps. It’s as if the sociological discourses of the past thirty years have had no effect on museum exhibitions. We don’t encounter the results of research into inter-ethnic relations or analyses of multiculturalism. Where are the exhibitions reflecting ethnographic explorations of a multi-ethnic society? Which museums give space to characteristic gypsy occupations alongside the masterpieces of craft industry? How many times have we come across an exhibition dealing with questions of assimilation, segregation, discrimination, racism or an ethnic conflict, and the critical aspects concerning co-existence? Exhibitions dealing with the resettlement of Hungary’s Germans, the history of Slovak-Hungarian population exchanges, and the memory of and disruptions to individual lives are very important, as are those which outline the cultural features of ethnic groups in a particular location or region. Nevertheless, such endeavours usually concern national minorities, while the only domestic ethnic minority which has no motherland outside Hungary, the Roma community, rarely gets a look in. However, it’s not worth making charges of discrimination. Quite simply, the majority of Hungarian museums lack the means of research and collection which would help them give a balanced representation of the minority cultures of a given area. The relevant proportions are undergoing change. Minority communities are rapidly assimilating. Maintaining and enriching their culture is becoming increasingly difficult. It’s not enough for minority local governments to create regional folk-art houses as tourist attractions. According to the latest, 2001 census, of the 10 million people in Hungary just over 3% identify themselves as members of a national or ethnic minority. This ratio is awfully small and the figure seems far removed from the real number estimated by researchers. At the time of the census, regarding the two largest national minorities 62,000 declared themselves German, while 17,000 were self-identified as Slovak. Researchers give figures of up to 220,000 and 110,000 respectively. The situation regarding Roma is even more dramatic. The census revealed 190,000 with Roma identity, though estimates reach 450,000, and sometimes rise to one million. In 2009 Ernő Kállai, the parliamentary ombudsman for national and ethnic minority rights, initiated an examination into the effectiveness of minority cultural rights. The resulting 450-page report analysed seven areas – museums, public libraries, protection of the built environment, cemeteries, the performing arts, cinema and international obligations. “The enquiry confirmed that minority cultural life is seriously underrepresented in every field,” he says, “which is mainly accounted for by the lack of legal regulation and state intervention. Typically, only the regional folk centres and some county and national museums regard it important to highlight different minority characteristics. With a few exceptions, museums don’t devote adequate attention to presenting their local communities – sometimes not even acknowledging their existence – thus they don’t hold it important to increase their collections to take account of those groups. There are counter examples, but in those instances making progress is hindered due to the lack of state funding and professional help. Naturally the ideal situation would be if minority local governments themselves established and maintained those museums displaying the cultural objects associated with their particular ethnic groups.” For the present situation to change, Ernő Kállai believes it’s first necessary to transform the system of state support to ensure an adequate financial basis for dealing with minority matters. “It’s a serious problem, for example, that currently local museums have some state and partly local authority support on the basis of the cultural activities managed by local governments, but these resources are divided and are not enough to maintain institutions, let alone develop them. With a view to resolving the situation, we proposed to the relevant minister the establishment of a financing system based on three pillars, in which direct funding, support for specially designated projects and competitive tenders would all play a role. Such a system would allow the functioning and development of individual museums in terms of their own requirements to be financed in the framework of planned and reliable calculations.” According to the report, it would be similarly important if a comprehensive cultural institute were established in the capital to deal with the cultures of all 13 minority communities. Such a House of Nationalities would engage in library, educational, performing arts and museum functions in relation to all of Hungary’s minority communities. The proposal points to the future, but for the time being we have to deal with the current system, in which the national museums, due to their size and prestige, are dominant. In addition to the fine arts collection maintained by the Roma cultural section of the Institute of Culture, only the Museum of Ethnography has its own important collection, which it started in the 1980s. In 2005 it seemed that the items already displayed in exhibitions would get their own building, with the objects of art technically remaining under the management of the museum. The plan, like many similar schemes, was not realised. The institute’s Roma collection was integrated on an item-by-item basis into the existing museum collections. Most recently the plan for a Roma Cultural Centre in the capital has been prepared. Similarly, it would involve the establishment of a comprehensive national collection. There are many possibilities for museums to reflect the heterogeneous nature of society. From the point of view of their own future it’s not all the same whether they tell the stories of past events and characters in a descriptive way or they initiate dialogue using whatever cultural means are at their disposal.