In his 1993 essay, 'From silence to Polyphony' the Hungarian art critic András Szántó wrote: "Why is there no political art in Hungary? The question leaps right off the gallery walls of Budapest, silent as they are about the drama that has just unfolded here. When future historians begin to chronicle the end of the 20th century in Hungary, they will find reams of documents in their archives and entire libraries stocked with fact and fiction about the turmoil of our time, but the artistic record will be all but blank."(1)

Szántó argues that this 'silence' can be ascribed to the continuation of habitual modes of expressing dissidence within the climate of oppression and censorship of the socialist era. At that time, the simple act of being an artist was viewed as a refusal to participate with the social system and therefore equated with political deviance. Rather than the content of their work being explicitly political, artists made political gestures by using cryptic references to Western styles. Usually these references could only be deciphered and appreciated by an educated cultural elite of artists and academics. In view of the political changes and consequent freedoms of expression now available, the continuation of a severance between art and society, both in terms of aesthetic content and a restricted audience, can no longer endow artists with integrity and virtue. The continued practice of 'l'art pour l'art' or a whispering in codes to an elite audience represents an obsolete artistic practice.

It was in this context that I arrived in Budapest three years ago and began making a number of street actions and interventions which were a response to my observations on how the expansion of the Western capitalist culture and values that I was accustomed to were affecting Hungarian society.

A number of my works were concerned with the appropriation and redefinition of urban public space for unofficial social purposes such as the temporary and illegal flea markets which evolved in public spaces as a necessary response by the city's homeless to their situation. Through an analysis of the documentation I had gathered concerning these flea markets, I became interested in the ethical considerations involved in representations of poverty. Throughout the history of socially concerned art and liberal journalism, experiences are usually disseminated for the public through images produced from the view of an 'outsider'. These images often serve to further alienate the 'victims' of society from an exclusive audience by reducing them to stereotypes, which evoke pity rather than understanding.

For her 1991 exhibition 'If you lived hereS' Martha Rosler wrote: "Documentary photography may inadvertently support the viewers' sense of superiority or, social paranoia. Especially in the case of homelessness, the viewers and the people pictured are never the same people. The images merely reproduce the situation of "us looking at them"SSince the problem of homelessness, like all social problems, exists in a stream of conflicting representations, it is not possible to change social reality without challenging its simplifying overlaid images."(2)

In July of 1997 I began a collaborative project called 'inside out' with a Hungarian artist, Miklós Erhardt, who shared an interest in the importance of an engagement with the social in art. Through this project we sought to both involve and address people who, since the economic changes, have found themselves destabilized and alienated from mainstream society and forced to pursue alternative means for survival. We embarked on a participative photographic project which, we hoped, would facilitate those directly experiencing conditions of homelessness and poverty to define it's product, therefore expressing a view from the 'inside out' rather than the dispossessing traditions of liberal art and journalism.

The project began when we secured initial sponsorship to buy some simple flash disposable cameras. We then offered these to homeless people in a variety of situations; on the streets, in emergency overnight shelters, in long stay shelters and asked them to photograph whatever they felt was important or interesting to them in their everyday lives, in the knowledge that these pictures would later be exhibited. We arranged to meet a few days later to pick up the camera and give some money from the sponsorship funds for their work. We arranged another meeting, once the photographs were processed, to give a set of prints and record an interview about the pictures. Again, we gave some money for participation. In their use of image and text, the approaches ranged from a social documentary to a poetic, metaphorical expression. The process continued from July until February of 1998. After this point we prepared an exhibition of 100 enlarged prints and corresponding comments. This was held at the 'Budapest Gálériá' from 19th March until 12th April. We also exhibited the work in Budapest's largest homeless shelter, created a web site (http://www.c3.hu/collection/homeless) and printed a set of saleable postcards. In it's approach to tackling the problems inherent in representations of poverty, this project had similarities to a number undertaken in the USA and Western Europe since the mid eighties. Budapest provided an interesting context for a project like this because of Eastern Europe's very different traditions of political art and nature of its homeless situation. This project was very important in capturing the view of those homeless and dispossessed people, many of whom, at least, had some degree of security in their lives under the previous political system, but who are now struggling to adapt to the western influenced economy and values. It was also important that the process was as important as the end product in allowing the participants to reflect and learn from their own and each others experience. It is also significant that this project was conceived and organized by two artists, one of whom was brought up in 'the east' and the other who was brought up in 'the west'.

Dominic Hislop, 1998.

Dominic Hislop lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Miklós Erhardt lives and works in Budapest, Hungary.

(1) "From Silence to Polyphony." Essay by András Szántó in Catalogue for 'Polyphony' an exhibition of site specific works. Budapest, 1993.

(2) "If you lived Here: The city in art, theory and social activism." Martha Rosler. Seattle: Bay Press, 1991. pp34-35.