17th March 2011 – 16th May 2011
Lajtai belongs to the first generation of digital imaging, so it is normal that he uses the new tools, that the era offers for the arts, freely. Digital technology is like that. However, there is a difference between the early classics of the genre and the works of Lajtai.The former were more attached to photograph, while Lajtai is more attached to painting. In his case, the image is made up of countless superimposed layers like lasure, where the world appears simultaneously a huge whole and a tiny part, intact and ravaged, visible both from the outside and from the inside. Lajtai believes in this diversity of viewpoints.In an interview, he said about the content of his pictures: A man wants to dream and he dreams. These are often nightmares, biased,combative, excluding and destructive.How is a dream born, which part of it becomes real, what trauma does awakening bring,and what to do with our dreams, which already dried into history, with our conscience burdened by our responsibility? (Judit Mosoni-Fried)
Curator: Peter Lajtai

​6th October 2010 – 07th January 2011
He was born as Béla Blau and even in 1934 he used this surname to sign the graphic design of some of the employees, even though the family had adopted the Hungarianized name for years.Then, in 1956, he practically dropped out of Hungarian art history and took most of his oeuvre with him to emigration. The young man, who graduated from the School of Industrial Arts and then the School of Applied Arts studied advertising design with Ferenc Helbing. The attitude that mobilizes with visual and typographic means plays a role several times throughout his career. His qualification as an applied graphic designer is used at the birth of anonymous flyers, political posters, and after 1963 decorations designed for the Israeli Army as a wage-earner job.None of this can be seen in his twisted, yet uninterrapted oeuvre even in the most extreme circumstances.Béla Bán was inoculated with leftism and ideologic commitment in the same visceral and invincible way as he was with pressure of fine art expression. In the early 1930s, he painted the pictoral toposes of international ploretarian emblem in a manner far from the antecedents, in the spirit of the new objectivity, Neue Sachlichkeit.
Curator: Anna Gábor

​24th August 2010 – 31st October 2010
Playfulness, exhilaration and joy – this is the stetl world of Tamás Köves. Chagall told us about the stetl, the Jewish town, village, its tales and dreams, but his pictures are repeatedly filled with the melancholy, the sadness and the sense of loss he feels over the disappearing world. The Jewish microcosm of Tamás Köves , however, deliberately breaks with this sadness, breaks with nostalgia. His characters are cheerful, lively figures, fitting into the stetl storybook who testify that it is good to live, it is good to live as a Jew. It captures the beauty, happiness and intimacy of holidays and the everyday life, suggesting that the zest for life that comes from a man beautifies life, giving the beauty of holidays and everyday life – turning reality that sometimes seems grey into a livable tale. This playfulness also drives the dynamics of the soul, and its the dynamic generates playfulness and allows you to express joy and all other emotions.
Curator: Rita Rusznák 

8th July 2010 – 15th August 2010
Bruno Bourel, a photographer from France, began taking photos in the Jewish quarter of Budapest in the mid-1990s. With these pictures, we would like to explain the transformation processes that took place in the lives of the Jews in Budapest after the change of regime. The captions written on the photos are the work of a young lyricist, who the general public may know from the band AkezdetPhiai. In addition to the 45 photos, the poetic and prose captions written by Péter Závada make the exhibition even more colourful.
”Black and white grids,margins, contours cut the paper crosswise.It is a kind of wooden structure,tire,a scaffolding of makeshift time. Weak slats, and chunky balks pressed by the weight of experience, like a large black sulky bird: raven, eagle, or turf.Phoenix by no means. Black and white.The sadness of crosswalk painters may also be this or a similar colour. I think we are all photosensitive. One way or another.” Peter Závada
 
Curator: Éva Gábor
Location: Rumbach Sebestyén Street Synagogue

26th March 2010 – 25th April 2010
She was born in Slovakia in 1948 and has lived in Israel since 1949. She studied art at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem from 1977-1981, and then graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a magna cum laude master’s degree in 2008. She lives and works in Jerusalem. The theme of her current doctoral dissertation is the poetry of Avigdor Hameriri. Her works can be found in the permanent collection of the Israel Museum, the Haifa Museum, the National Museum (Washington D.C.I), at Ben Gurion University, Mishkenot Sha’ ananim, and in several public and private collections both inside and outside Israel. She has published four volumes of poetry, three in Hebrew and one in Hungarian: ”Words in Visuality.” (Hebrew), ”Portraits” (Hebrew),Materials in No-Man’s Land (Hebrew), Exile (Hungarian).
Curator: Rita Rusznák

​18th January 2010 – 22nd March 2010
The material of the exhibition was collected and compiled by the staff of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation.The exhibited material, the videos, photos and household objects show what happened there from a special perspective.The exibition focuses on the women, girls of Buchenwald, and their personal stories. When Charlotte Kestner, the former love of Goethe, from whom he modeled the character of Charlotte in Werther, visited Weimar, she enjoyed the beauty of life and social life. The forgotten women of Buchenwald got suffering and struggled to survive.Yet they have something in common: the love of life, that was transformed by the women of Buchenwald from cliche into reality.We can learn about the survivors’ recollections, personal belongings and testimonies.The figures we learn in history books become faces, personal acquaintances.In Hungary, this exhibition is even more important than elsewhere, since most of Buchenwald’s women were deported from Hungary. Remembrance also expresses belief. beliefe in the facts that mankind and individual people learn from the past, that education, culture and technical civilization still have an ennobling  power, and that Ghoethe’s Weimar is stronger than the Buchenwald of the Nazis. (The speech of Prof. Dr. Volkhard Knigge, Director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation, was delivered by the curator, Ramona Bräu. – abridged version).
Curator: Ramona Bräu

​24th August 2009 – 13th Spetember 2009
Robert Capa is a legend in press  photography. What made him a legend was that he saw and presented the myth in reality and the reality in myth; everyday life in history and history in everyday life.The Death of a Loyalist Militiaman sums up the fall of the Spanish Republicans in one single image, while the photographs of the disembarkation of Normandy show the historical significance of D-Day. His photos taken in Israel in 1948-50, show the myth and daily life of the birth of the Jewish state, which can be described by a quote in the book of the prophet Nehemiah, chosen as the motto of the exhibition: ”They which builded on the wall, and they that bare burdens, with those that laded, every one with one of his hands wrought int he work, and with the other hand held a weapon” (Nehemiah 4.11). The exhibition attempts to show, based on these 52 photographs, how Robert Capa captured the moments the birth and the first steps of the Jewish state; how he saw myth and reality: the arrival of immigrants, their everyday life, work and struggles, the clashes and images of the first Arab-Israeli war.
Curator: Lívia Páldi

​10th June 2009 – 10th August 2009

The exhibition presents the previously little-known dimension of the Holocaust: the activities of two brave Portuguese diplomats who stood up for Jews and those persecuted for their political beliefs in Budapest in 1944, following the German occupation. Sampayo Garrido and his successor Teixeira Branquinho recognized that the extraordinary historical situation – the rampage of fascist terror – demands extraordinary measures. Temporary Portuguese individual and group passports were issued to a thousand persecuted Hungarians, mostly Jews.At the exhibition, we present original telegrams and documents that prove how they were coping. The curiosity of the exhibition are the original recordings made in Lisbon in 1940/41, which were already on display at an exhibition on a similar themeheld in Portugal in 2000. The photos are poignant snapshots of the everyday lives of refugees.

Curator: Vera Faragó