Border Situations is the Budapest exhibition of the LEAP – LEgAcy in Progress: (Re)Constructing European Narratives and (De)colonising Discourses project. Starting from the historical memory of the transatlantic slave trade, the exhibition examines how colonialism continues to shape the present. Following Aníbal Quijano, it uses the term coloniality to refer to the afterlife of colonialism: the ways its effects persist in modern societies. The exhibition understands this as a logic that reproduces hierarchies by granting unequal access to protection, mobility, and recognition.
Hungary was not a classical colonial power, yet the exhibition argues that colonial modernity — that is, the continuation of relations inherited from colonialism — extends beyond the geography of former empires. Stereotypes tied to skin colour and origin continue to shape institutions, border regimes, labour relations, and everyday language. In this sense, inequalities produced by colonialism are also reproduced in Hungary, alongside internal colonisation and self-exonerating narratives of victimhood. Solidarity is therefore framed here as a practice that can be learned: not pity, but self-critique, risk-taking, and accountability. In François Piquet’s two-channel film, parallel monologues by Guadeloupean, white, and racialised (non-white) speakers make the possibility of allyship perceptible through the viewer’s own reactions.
From the perspective of Budapest, Border Situations draws attention to phenomena such as policing practices that disproportionately affect Roma communities, anti-refugee visual propaganda after 2015, the precarity of migrant labour, and the absences and distortions in the public representation of minority communities. Its central concern is racism as normality: the routine, often barely perceptible modes of operation that make discrimination part of everyday life rather than an exception. Here, the border is not only a political and geographical dividing line, but also an embodied experience, an institutional practice, and part of public discourse.
The works in the exhibition approach these questions through the border, language, and the articulation of one’s own perspective: they make visible the regimes of entry and surveillance, the cost of mobility in labour, in family life stretched across time zones, and in urban space, as well as the language of slogans, propaganda, and the debates surrounding the dismantling of colonial ways of seeing. Community collaborations rooted in Budapest’s social reality bring into view Roma experience, the reversal of stigma, the search for possible futures, and participatory, performative attempts to process collective trauma, while avoiding performative empathy, the spectacularization of suffering, and liberal self-congratulation. Workshops, guided sessions, and roundtable discussions create an open space for dialogue, attention, and debate.
🔵Participating artists: Gypsy Criminals collective, Sarah Diefallah, Róza El-Hassan, Anna Fabricius, Mansour Forouzesh, Zahra (Saba) Fuladvand, Anita Horváth, Dorottya Szonja Koltay, Norbert Oláh, Tímea Anita Oravecz, François Piquet, Regina Sárvári
🔵Curator: Johanna Liber
🔵Curatorial assistant: Osvay Dorottya Ilona
This project is funded by the European Union’s Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme of the European Union.