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Please join Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI) and Columbia’s Harriman Institute for a panel discussion on right-wing governmental interference in the arts and cultural sector in Hungary and Poland.  The event will center around two reports recently released by AFI’s Artistic Freedom Monitor, Systematic Suppression: Hungary’s Arts and Culture in Crisis and Cultural Control: Censorship and Suppression of the Arts in Poland, both offering an in-depth analysis of how illiberal approaches to governance have impacted Hungary and Poland’s artists, cultural workers, and arts institutions.

The Hungary panel will focus on the rise of FIDESZ, the placement of the Hungarian Academy of Art (MMA) as a conservative oversight body for arts and culture, the consolidation of media, and the systematic stacking of the country’s major arts and culture institutions with party loyalists.  The featured presenters will include:

• Barnabás Bencsik, former director of the Ludwig Museum (2008 – 2013), co-founder of the Glassyard Gallery in Budapest, independent curator and gallerist

• Szabolcs KissPál, Hungarian visual artist and academic

• Emese Pásztor, assistant professor in the faculty of law of ELTE University and legal counsel at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union

The Poland panel will discuss PiS’s use of blasphemy and defamation laws to intimidate artists, the Ministry of Culture’s overhaul of the management of arts and cultural institutions, the denigration of artists in the media, and the emboldening of private actors to harass and threaten artists.  This session will feature:

• Filip Pawlak, former head of production at the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, “cripple-queer” performer and activist

• Agnieszka Jakimiak, theater director and playwright

• Malgorzata Kazmierczak, art curator, researcher, vice president of AICA International, and professor at the Pedagogical University of Kraków