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László Beke—the renowned Hungarian art historian and curator of several progressive art events of the 1970s—sent out a call to 28 artists, asking them to submit sheets that would fit into A4-size document folders following the concept “WORK = the DOCUMENTATION OF THE IMAGINATION/IDEA.” Beke arranged and preserved the sheets he received in folders and they could be viewed at his flat. Over the last ten years, due to the renewed interest in the collection, “Imagination” has been featured at several exhibitions both in Hungary and internationally and was also presented as a publication in itself. The English-language edition was initiated and edited by tranzit.hu and co-published by JRP Ringier.

The exhibition at Tranzitdisplay—organized by the tranzit network—looked at Beke’s collection in an international context through other projects that also took place in the year 1971 as well as through the history of conceptual art exhibitions. The other legendary 1971 art projects that were on display—similarly to the sheets of the Hungarian artists— can be interpreted as “exhibitions in a publication format.”

One of them is the book Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa presenting East European artists of the time and published at Dumont Aktuell by artist and collector Klaus Groh. The other exhibition projects highlighted are “At the Moment” (Zagreb) and “At Another Moment” (Belgrade) at which the curators Nena and Braco Dimitrijević experimented with the format of the exhibition in space and time. The two exhibitions showcased works by artists from Yugoslavia and by international representatives of conceptual art. The Belgrade exhibition also included a catalogue, which will also be on view.

Another aim of “Imagining Conceptual Art” was to survey László Beke’s international art network that unfolded beginning in the 1970s. The exhibition also gathered information about the internationality of the art world of the time centered around less object-oriented and increasingly dematerialized practices, which we now call, in a broad sense, conceptual art.

A possible map of the reception of conceptual art with a focus on geopolitical and cultural relations was also created for the exhibition. The timeline of the map starts from projects of the era, such as Beke’s collection or artist Dóra Maurer’s activity supporting the international presence of Hungarian artists, and runs until current projects that revisit the period of the 1960s and 1970s. This section looked primarily at the history of exhibitions, including artistic and curatorial research projects such as tranzit.hu’s “Parallel Chronologies: An Archive of East European Exhibitions.”

Works presented at the exhibition from the “Imagination” collection include those by Gábor Attalai, Imre Bak, Miklós Erdély, István Haraszty, György Jovánovics, Ilona Keserü Ilona, Dezső Korniss, László Lakner, János Major, Gyula Pauer, Géza Perneczky, Sándor Pinczehelyi and Péter Türk. The exhibition also featured reflections by contemporary artists Virág Bogyó, Judit Fischer and Szilárd Miklós, among others. The exhibition concept was developed by Dóra Hegyi, Zsuzsa László and Eszter Szakács in collaboration with László Beke. The Czech exhibition chronology was compiled by Pavlina Morganova, while the Slovak chronology was assembled by Daniel Grúň. The exhibition display was designed by by Zbyněk Baladrán and Ondřej Kozák.

Material from the Museum of the River Daugava was used for the exhibition 'Let the River Daugava Be', which opened on 21 September 2017 at the National History Museum of Latvia. The exhibition was about the struggle by the public to save part of the Daugava valley in 1958-1959, and the campaign against the construction of the Daugavpils hydroelectric station in 1986-1987. 

On 10 October 2017 the collection was increased with Laszlo Ocsovszky’s collection, who is a retired journalist, son-in-law of Gyuláné Szentirmai, the Galyasi’s last caregiver. The volume of his collection is about four archival boxes, which includes the Galyasi’s literary work, correspondence, personal and official documents and photos.

On the occasion of the exhibition “Apprenticeship among arts: Sorin Costina collector,” organized by ARCUB, a volume was launched that analyses both the profile of the Bucharest exhibition of works selected from the Sorin Costina collection and the specific character of the complete art collection owned by Sorin Costina. The editor-coordinator of the volume is Erwin Kessler, one of the most well-known Romanian aestheticians and curators, and has a title corresponding to that of the exhibition. It was published in a Romanian–English bilingual edition by the Vellant publishing house in 2017.

Of the specific character of the collection, Erwin Kessler writes: “Through the ambitious profile of his collection and its scope in relation to the cultural geography of Romanian art, not to mention the number of pieces (which approaches 1,000, bringing together painting, sculpture, ceramic, and drawing), the Sorin Costina collection stands out as the most consistent, significant, and representative collection of Romanian art of the 1970 to 1990s. It is a sort of (reified) treatise on the Romanian art of the period after the prescription of socialist realism, a codex of Romanian art created outside (but not so much opposing as ignoring) the dogmas of official art, in which may be recognized almost all the names that made up (then) and make up (now too) the canon of Romanian contemporary art.” The volume also includes a postface by Sorin Costina and a catalogue of the Sorin Costina Collection by Carola Chişiu, together with high-quality reproductions of the most representative pieces in the collection.

Péter Halász’s archive was opened to researchers in 2017. On this occasion, an exhibition and roundtable were organized about the avantgarde writer, director, and actor’s works showing documents from the HP archive. The archive is based on Péter Halász’s so-called newspaper-theater performances, titled “Power Money Fame Beauty Love,” which was composed in the Kamra Theater in Budapest in 1994. The actors read the page-proofs of one of the main daily newspapers, Népszabadság (People’s Freedom), the night before publication. Inspired by the news, they created a play which was shown only once, the following evening, when the readers received the paper. 28 performances were created in this manner. In 2003, the undergraduates of the University of Theater and Film Arts of Budapest collected the articles, playbooks, reviews, and video records about the plays and based on these documents they made short films, as well. The whole documentation of this project was given to Artpool. This became the HP archive.