St. Martin Year at Pannonhalma
We are Together: Ten Stories of Today in Photos
This year Pannonhalma Abbey is celebrating the 1700th anniversary of the birth of Saint Martin. In 996 Prince Géza designated the saint of ancient Christian as well as medieval times to be the patron of the country’s first Benedictine monastery. The choice related to the royal traditions of the Carolingian age and its living traditions, which were connected with Martin’s birthplace, Pannonhalma, the Holy Hill in Pannonia. The most well-known legend concerning Martin, according to which he cut his military cloak in half to share with a pagan beggar, along with the slogan of the memorial year – We are Together – provide the conceptual basis of the exhibition Sharing 10 x 10. In the display’s 10 sets of ten photos visitors encounter the stories of ten Hungarians whose actions reflect Martin’s deed, people who lend a helping hand beyond their means, aiming, almost contradicting logic, to accept responsibility for others, overcoming their prejudices, their particular spheres of activity, as well as social and cultural habits. Visitors can feel that we are truly in a community, not just with the soldier and bishop who lived here fifty generations ago, but also with each other. When planning the exhibition, it was important that this community would be present not just as the exhibition theme, but as a resource in every stage of the preparation, and we believe our joint efforts and shared thinking shaped the display in line with Pannonhalma’s well-known openness. Documentary photography provided the toolkit whose primary content can be simply decoded yet it operates with several levels of meaning, through which – as seen by the annual 80-100,000 visitors in the temporary exhibition hall at the end of the guided tour of the monastery – the ideas of St Martin can be brought to life. The ten sets are divided into three units. Four relate to children and teenagers, four mainly concern adults, while two feature the lives of people helping the elderly. The subjects of the photographs have been chosen such that they can all be familiar, people whom the visitors can identify with and who, within the limited framework, represent Hungarian society. Three photographers, Attila Balázs, András D. Hajdú and Zsófia Pályi, were asked to participate. We had in mind that Pályi would take part as a female artist, while in selecting Balázs, who lives in Nyíregyháza, we aimed to counter the palpable, significant bias towards the capital within the photographic profession. With them, with the abbey’s cultural office, the cultural director Konrád Dejcsics, and with Nóra Majoros, in coordinating the exhibition we aimed to assemble the list of people in the photographs such that they would be as varied as possible.