Kelet-Európa közös nyelve a groteszk (fotó)

Grotesque – The common language of Eastern Europe

The project is co-financed by the governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

Grotesque is indeed a lingua franca or the common language of Eastern Europe, rooted in the region’s peoples shared past for centuries, through which one can feel a greater sense of belonging. The Grotesque photo project will make this phenomenon rather tangible and visible with a newspaper-like publication and guerilla photo exhibitions at festivals in Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary throughout 2025 showing the best absurd photographs of the past decades coming from the New East.

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake.

How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.”

“That is true,” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak.”

Franz Kafka: The Trial

The region once known as the Eastern Bloc, from the Baltic region to the Balkans, has for centuries been a buffer zone between East and West on the edge of Europe. Due to Tatar, Turkish, Austrian, German, and later American and Russian influence, borders were constantly shifting, and even in the 20th century one did not have to move to become a citizen of four countries in just a few decades. In addition to external forces, there was no shortage of neighbours teasing each other. Ukraine–Russia war has brought all this back into sharper focus.

This miserable fate and, above all, almost half a century of Soviet influence shaped the common reflexes that still live on today and bind together the minds of the diverse and multilingual peoples living in this region: self-reliance in the face of oppressive power, the ability to read between the lines and a bittersweet humour that shines a mirror on your own impossible situation, in other words, the unmistakable Eastern European grotesque.

Grotesque is a widely used artistic tool and style throughout Eastern Europe and has been for long. Prominent artists such as Franz Kafka, István Örkény, Jaroslav Hašek, Bohumil Hrabal or Krzysztof Kieślowski have all used grotesque as a means of expression. Qualities such as nonsense, absurd, tragicomic, kafkaesque, bizarre or odd pop-up in their work all the time, all of which capture the coping strategies of the inhabitants of a region with a very turbulent past. Thus they speak from our souls.

In the last 30 years, since the fall of socialism, everyone has been trying to get rid of the Eastern European label. Why should we throw away this undoubtedly existing and widely used label, instead of filling it with new content? Our goal is to nuance the meaning of „Eastern European identity”, so that people of the region can focus not on the negative content of the term shaped by a Western perception along the logic of the Cold War era that ended already three decades ago, but on the much more humane common denominator, concentrating on the obvious similarities! Let’s let go of the stigma attached to us and fill the term Eastern European with new, more endearing and more empathic meaning!

István Virágvölgyi

Curator

Exhitibions in 2025:

June 12–22 Fotofestiwal (Łódź, Poland)

August 20–24 Arcus Temporum Art Festival (Pannonhalma, Hungary)

October 3–12 Fotograf Festival (Prague, Czech Republic)

November 7–21 OFF Bratislava (Bratislava, Slovakia)

Partners: