BORN IN TRANSITION exhibition opening

Opening: December 5, 2025 (Friday) 6:00 pm

Following the opening, a '90s-themed party will take place on site. Details coming soon.

On view at aqb Project Space: December 5, 2025–February 14, 2026

2025 marks a quarter of a century since the closure of the Nineties — but in some ways it still has yet to end: our present, both in Hungary and globally, continues to be profoundly shaped by the social, technological, political, economic, and cultural paradigm shifts that unfolded during the years of this exceptionally transformative era.

Born in Transition presents Hungarian artists belonging to the generation that came of age in this period from the destruction of the Berlin Wall to the destruction of the World Trade Center, whose works reflect on events and phenomena of the “long Nineties” that are at once political in scope and deeply personal in impact. Oscillating between a worm's-eye view of children and an aerial view of an adult, they engage with issues such as the contradictory afterlife of the ideological and material remnants of Socialism; the capitalist turn that brought opportunity to some and hopelessness to others; the rise of spirituality and esotericism amid existential uncertainty; the sudden and exhilarating influx of Western mass culture; radical rave fantasies and techno-utopias, the infamous earthworm-scam that affected tens of thousands, the televised execution of the Ceaușescus or the assassination of media mogul János Fenyő.

Just as the announcement of Prime Minister József Antall’s death in 1993 abruptly interrupted a broadcast of the popular DuckTales series, colliding the adult political reality with the whimsical fantasy world of children for whom this became a generational flashbulb memory, the exhibition is defined by the intersection of oppositions. The works are at the meeting points of the individual and the collective, the personal and the political, childhood and adulthood; the ambivalent interweaving of naïve, nostalgic, optimistic elements with disillusioning, critical, and traumatic ones, as well as the stark contrast but also the curious continuity between the Zeitgeist of that era and the Zeitgeist of the present.

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Born in Transition is an expanded version of the exhibition previously presented at Studio Hanniball in Berlin.

The opening event is supported by Esterházy Etyeki Kúria Winery.

Graphics by Judit Lilla Molnár.