Sinners
An Interview with Karol Radziszewski and Gyula Muskovics

Márk Rékai

Icon- and cover image:
Karol Radziszewski: Riders on the Shore (after Károly Kernstok) ╱ 2025 ╱ acrylic on two canvases ╱ 200×150 cm each ╱ Courtesy of the artist

Márk Rékai: Both of your practices — artistic and curatorial — engage deeply with the research, preservation and canonisation of Eastern-European queerness and its art-historical context. How did your collaboration for Sinners and DIK Fagazine Budapest begin, and what was the conceptual starting point or curatorial intention behind this exhibition at acb Gallery?

Gyula Muskovics: We got to know each other around 2011, when I was writing my thesis on queer art in Eastern Europe, which was a subject nobody had really discussed at the time. Then I discovered Karol, who was already deeply engaged with how gay people lived under communism. He was working on a project called Kisieland, which was about Ryszard Kisiel, the creator of the first Eastern European gay zine, Filo. I remember finding it fascinating, as it was the first time I encountered something that was different from the usual Western queer narrative.

Karol Radziszewski: I always wanted to cover the whole region of the so-called Central–Eastern Europe, so Budapest has been on my map for a long time, and I had long-hoped to do the research with Gyula, but somehow the right moment never came. DIK Fagazine comes out very irregularly, and because of that, things kept shifting constantly. It has been twenty years since I started the magazine, yet the Budapest issue will only be its fifteenth. The paradox was that we knew it would happen, and Gyula had the knowledge and enthusiasm, but we kept postponing it. After the latest Vienna issue however, which already included many elements from Austro-Hungarian history, I said: “No, finally we have to do it”.

GyM: Our goal was to collect everything we had and show it to the people in the form of a magazine. The exhibition serves as one layer of this overarching project, which has been pursued actively for the past two or three years and, more passively, since 2011–2012.

MR: To what extent has the current political situation in Hungary, and the rise of fascism and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, affected you or the project in general?

MGy: Our project is strongly connected to the political situation. I really felt the need to say something at some point. Since our government is trying to make queer people invisible, I thought it would be the perfect moment to put together a magazine full of them. So, that’s exactly what we did. The Budapest Issue is full of dicks and sweaty bodies of all kinds fucking around and subverting the system form the 19th century to the present. 

KR: Poland, Hungary and Slovakia are the most homophobic countries in Europe, but Orbán’s proposed laws sparked such intense public discourse in the media that many people began to see Hungary as having a Russia-like law regarding LGBT people. We wanted to present the current situation by showcasing what is actually forbidden. For example, our show is rated 18+, not only because of nudity but also because of the LGBTQ+ issues it addresses. These restrictions, which are unique to Hungary within the EU, still provide a strong contextual framework for the exhibition and the magazine — the same applies to the banning of Pride events.

MR: Karol, in a previous interview with L’Internationale you mentioned that, between 2008 and 2011, you conducted an extensive project mapping queer life in Central and Eastern Europe before 1989, which also included the Hungarian scene. Did that early research provide the groundwork for Sinners?

KR: I learned about the work of the documentary film director Mária Takács that in 2017 resulted in a contribution to the special issue of DIK with a text and photos about Hungarian lesbians during the communist era. That was the first material on this topic that appeared in my magazine. Then I realised that there is a separate lesbian archive and a separate LGBTQ+ archive, so I decided to make a proper trip to Budapest to research both — but again, it was postponed…

GyM: Mária Takács, by the way, is a very important figure. In her films Eltitkolt évek (Secret Years, 2009) and Meleg férfiak, hideg diktatúrák (Gay Men, Straight Dictatorships, 2015), we hear stories about how gay and lesbian people lived, partied, and fell in love with each other during the Kádár-era. The research she did for these two movies is pretty unique. For the new issue of DIK, we interviewed her about the beginnings of the lesbian movement in Hungary.

MR: You often note that conducting interviews and meeting local activists forms the backbone of your archival practice. Was this dialogic, fieldwork-based approach present again here? How did you and Gyula approach the research together?

KR: When it comes to these archival projects, we are always talking about collaborations between me and the people living in that particular country. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to conduct research because of my lack of familiarity with the cultural context and the language. I usually reach out to one artist, who can then introduce me to the local queer scene and organizations — this way, I can meet older queer people who still vividly remember the past and can tell their own stories. 

But this time it was completely different, because we had been talking about this project for so long that Gyula was able to plan my entire trip in advance — really, three meetings per day. It was the first time I had this kind of luxury, just visiting one archive after another, like the ballet archive, dance archive, theater archive, lesbian archive, and so on. We knew we wouldn’t use everything we found, but having access to such a wide variety of archives was incredibly exciting — it gave us the chance to make new discoveries. Besides this research trip, I had visited the National Gallery three years ago on my own to look at some paintings as part of my intuitional research process. Later, I asked Gyula about different artworks and artists, and that’s how we connected. By the end of the process, we had far more material than we could actually include in the issue.

GyM: I would say the whole research started ca. 3 years ago when Karol was working on the previous issue of DIK Fagazine about Vienna. He wanted to include a few stories from Austro-Hungarian times and I helped him in the research and then I ended up writing a piece about Ferenc Nopcsa, who was an aristocrat with a quiet adventurous life — everything you can imagine happened to him, from discovering dinosaur bones to hijacking a plane and almost becoming the king of Albania… There is a portrait of him with his boyfriend at the exhibition.

So during that trip, I remember Karol one day visited the National Gallery, and said that it was full of queer artists compared to museums in other postcommunist countries. Then I suggested we go to Fiumei Street Graveyard, where all those gay painters are buried, to “cruise a little” with their ghosts. We spent a few hours there and we also visited the tomb of Károly Kertbeny, the person who actually coined the terms “homo-” and “heterosexual.” These two words were invented by a Hungarian. That’s how I think the story began — and how we actually started working on this issue and the exhibition. I remember that Karol found it amusing that the first place I took him was a cemetery. But what do you expect from a Hungarian?

KR: Absolutely, we had a great time there. But it was interesting in another way as well. When I started the archival research and the magazine, my focus was mostly on the communist era. For this issue, however, I became much more interested in different periods of history, such as the 19th and early-20th centuries, and in international connections. For example, the relationship between Hungary and Vienna, or the story of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky — a Polish dancer, born in Kyiv, raised in Russia, who became a star in France, traveled extensively, lived in Budapest, as he had a Hungarian wife but he was bisexual and became queer icon over time. These kinds of connections fascinated me. At that moment, I was much more drawn to exploring these queer “geographies” and historical links from the past, rather than simply trying to be precise about dates and events from the 1970s and 1980s during the communist era.

MR: The exhibition features numerous paintings, most of which are portraits of figures connected to Hungarian queer (art) history. What guided your selection of these individuals in particular?

KR: Everything emerged from our joint research and fieldwork, during which we collected an enormous amount of material. After that, we had to decide what would appear in the magazine, what would be presented in the exhibition, and how these two layers relate to or diverge from each other. The story of Nijinsky is a bit of an exception. That was part of my own separate research, which I became somewhat obsessed with, so I really wanted to visit the house where he stayed in Budapest, and so on. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have a large painting of him performing here, and eventually at the Dance Archive we managed to find a photograph of him taken during a 1912 performance in Budapest.

The other figures are mostly those who also appear in the magazine. I especially wanted to paint a portrait of Sándor Vay, a transgender poet from the 19th century about whom we have a lyrical text written by Tanya Marquardt in the magazine. In the case of Tamás Király and El Kazovsky, their presence is more through their works included in the issue, so in the exhibition we were looking at their portrait together as I wanted to capture that atmosphere in one painting. Gyula showed me one that embodies this punk, 1980s fashion energy, and it immediately made sense.

For the magazine, my approach is more discursive, but when it comes to deciding which figures to paint, in what size and format, the source material becomes crucial. If a photograph is visually striking, or if it simply grabs my attention, I know whether it could become a large, “iconic” painting or a small, intimate one. So in many ways, the visual references themselves guided the selection of portraits.

GyM: The figures Karol depicted are all strongly connected to the way we built up the structure of the magazine. They are a very diverse, eclectic group of people, a community drawn from different moments in history from the late-19th century to the present. The oldest person in the room, Sándor Vay, and the youngest, Peti, are immensely different, yet what connects them is that they both strongly represent what they want and what they think about the world and they’re not afraid to say it out loud. And we think people like them deserve far more visibility in history books, in art history, and in the broader cultural canon

MR: The new photographic series called Peti presents intimate fragments of gay identity. In the sound installation created by Máté Janky, which is also related to these works, we hear Peti’s blatantly honest monologue about his (sexual) life, filling the entire exhibition space. What is the story or encounter behind these pieces and how do they engage in dialogue with the paintings presented alongside them? 

GyM: When I was teaching a class on queer world-building, I took my students to Népliget, a park widely known as a gay cruising spot in Budapest. I hadn’t really known the park in that context because I usually go there just to run in the mornings — but when I told Peti, who’s a friend of a friend, about our little expedition, he seemed to know it pretty well. So when I was organising the schedule for Karol’s visit, I really wanted him to give us an interview or guide us through the park. What happened next was completely unexpected. Peti shared incredible stories, and then, quite suddenly, he asked for poppers and started posing. The photoshoot unfolded really intuitively from that moment.

KR: For me, it is essential that the history I archive is not treated as nostalgia or as a set of museum relics. These histories actively shape the current political landscape and the future. Right-wing politicians, both in Poland and in Hungary, constantly use cultural heritage, national poets and “founding fathers” as ideological tools. Culture and history are among their favourite instruments. So I work actively with the same material, but from the opposite perspective. In this sense, creating an issue of the magazine or an exhibition that is eclectic yet deeply connected to the present not only politically, but also in terms of lived experience, becomes part of my strategy. When I place a large painting referencing a work from a hundred years ago next to photographs from recent cruising encounters, the audience is prompted to see the past as something active and alive, something that offers a more explicit lens on the present.

That is also why the title is Sinners, because each figure resists the norms or the “natural order” that society tries to impose. This connects them across time.

There is also a very practical aspect. I have written many times about cruising during the communist era — Kisiel, whom we mentioned earlier, was documenting cruising all over Central Europe. He took notes, made photographs, and recorded the culture of these spaces. One of his photographs from Budapest from the late 1970s will appear in our Budapest issue. But I always felt, in a way, like a historian who had never personally experienced cruising. So when Gyula gave me the opportunity to visit Népliget in a safe, guided way, I could finally experience it myself — and take photographs for the first time, not only of sites that were active decades ago, but of actual cruising moments happening now.

GyM: I would also like to add that according to Karol, this will be the most explicit and radical issue of the magazine so far, especially in its depiction of darker, more disturbing, and more overtly sexual themes. In addition, it addresses topics like murder, suicide, prison and death.. And these are subjects we should talk about, especially in relation to queer life, because they are part of many people’s lived experiences. But to engage with material this heavy, it was crucial that we had a deeper personal relationship as well. Without us being friends it probably wouldn’t have been possible.

MR: At the core of the exhibition space stands a pair of vitrines gathering both contemporary and archival documents. How did you envision the exchange between these materials and the surrounding artworks, and how does this interplay inform a queer reading of history? Do the materials act as research sources, or do they assert themselves as artworks in their own right?

KR: Vitrines always operate on multiple levels in my exhibitions. On the one hand, they allow me to play with the aesthetics of museums and the museumification of history. I create these vivid, eclectic environments filled with colourful paintings. On the other hand, the vitrines hold research materials that could never be conveyed through a handful of portraits or short wall texts alone. I find it important to include the actual objects; books, zines, photographs directly in the space. For example, when you look at the photographs of Gyula and his friend Chad posing naked at a nudist beach near Újpest, it immediately evokes the male nudes of the nineteenth century, giving you a sense of continuity across time. In this way, the vitrines enable a kind of back-and-forth gaze through art history, but from a distinctly queer perspective. I wouldn’t necessarily call the documents inside “artworks” on their own; rather, the vitrine as a whole functions as an installation.

GyM: But the documents inside the vitrines also enter into dialogue with the paintings and with one another. For instance, we included the cover of Mások, the first Hungarian gay magazine, which was published from 1989 to 2008. In one of the first issues, which still had a zine format, the editors interviewed various political parties about their views on gay and lesbian people. On the cover there is a quote from Fidesz — which at the time was a liberal, progressive party — stating that they envision a society where everyone is equal and free to do whatever they want as long as it does not violate the freedom of others. So when people look up from this document, what they see is a huge photo of Peti kneeling naked in Népliget in a devotional pose. The tension is further intensified by the police sirens echoing through the sound installation in the background.

MR: Have you consciously chosen the monumental reinterpretation of Károly Kernstok’s Riders at the Shore (1910) as the centerpiece of the exhibition, in a way that echoes how museums traditionally structure space? Why Kernstok in particular — was it the painter himself, or the overt homoeroticism of the work that drew you to it?

KR: The performative aspect of that monumental painting was really important to me, because it functions like a scenographic element, providing a striking backdrop of athletic, naked men for the other works on display. The size of the painting was intentional from the very beginning — in this way, anyone entering the exhibition is immediately immersed in it, stepping into this world.

GyM: I think it’s also important to stress that the original Riders at the Shore, a canonized painting hanging in the National Gallery, is almost the same size as Karol’s version and it looks very similar. On both paintings we basically see top guys sitting on horses, looking for bottoms — or at least, that’s what we joked about. And Karol really didn’t change much from the original work: just made the colors brighter and a few dicks bigger, but the core of the scene — the postures, the forms — remained exactly the same. The message is that queer people have always been part of the world and, no matter what, we keep fucking around like the guys on Kernstok’s painting — and like everyone else.

KR: The idea is that you can go to any museum with a “queer eye,” seeing things through your own desires and perspective. When I repaint something that is part of national history and identity, without changing much at all, collectors, politicians, older audiences, and Hungarians in general are forced to confront the eroticism already present in the original work. When I showed this painting in Poland, people didn’t even realize it was referencing an existing piece. They just thought, “Oh, Karol made this new gay painting with a lot of boys on horses — what a great idea!” That was hilarious to me, because it proves that when conservatives say that only art itself matters — and the identity of the artist does not, it’s exactly opposite. Because I’m gay, people immediately label it a “gay painting.” Only when they learn it references national heritage do they start to get confused and search for the details I’ve changed, but then realize they’ve fallen into the trap: the entire composition already contained homoeroticism and gay desire from the beginning.

GyM: When it comes to a queer artist, art historians tend to handle their queerness as something personal that doesn’t belong to the art they make. Whereas if it’s a straight artist, their wife or husband is constantly brought up, as if that context were naturally relevant.

This is exactly the situation with Károly Hopp-Halász, whose solo exhibition I also curated in acb gallery’s other space (Bodies Coming Out). He’s known among the big neo-avantgarde artists but there are many queer references in his works which people tended to ignore until about 10 years ago. Even though desire is a crucial part of his art and if you look at the exhibited works it becomes pretty obvious.

But obviously there are academics who are more progressive and doing important work, like Judit Boros — with whom we also made an interview for DIK. She wrote an extensive study on the homoerotic symbolism in Károly Ferenczy’s art around the turn of the century and we found her research truly fascinating, so we talked with her about that. 

MR: Your collaborative research on Hungarian queer art constitutes perhaps the most comprehensive recent inquiry into this field. Which aspects of this vast cultural heritage remain most under-represented or overlooked in your view? (And personally — what questions or archives would each of you like to pursue next?)

GyM: I’d like to underline one thing: we are not the only ones researching queer history in Hungary, and it’s important to acknowledge the people who paved the way — those who worked alongside us or long before us. At the same time, it’s striking how many artists and art historians still seem hesitant, even afraid, to address (homo)sexuality and queerness directly. I don’t necessarily know why this is the case, but it’s definitely a conversation we should have at some point.

KR: I’d also add that the magazine is called DIK Fagazine, and we are both gay men — which means that, even though we identify as queer because of our lifestyles, our perspective is inevitably limited. That’s why I think what really needs to be pursued now is more research and more artworks by people with different identities: non-binary people, trans people — they should be the ones telling their own stories. The LGBTQ+ community is incredibly diverse, and even if we try to touch on different aspects of queer identity, the future of this kind of work has to move in that direction.

GyM: Just to mention one example: a few years ago I had a scholarship at the Open Society Archives to do research on gay and lesbian cruising under communism. And I realised there was almost nothing about women. In these kinds of archives, there’s always a hierarchy of visibility: gay men appear first, then lesbian women and trans people are even more hidden. So there are still many gaps, even though we tried to touch on most of them. But I think this is where future research comes in. If younger people find even a single text or a piece of information in our magazine that resonates with them, they will at least know which archive to turn to.

We should also mention the people and institutions who supported us throughout this journey: Mária Takács, the film director we referenced earlier; László Láner, the publisher of Mások; Péter Hanzli, the archivist at the Háttér Archive who’s doing an incredible job; the Labrisz Lesbian Archive; Tamás Halász at the Dance Archive; or the El Kazovsky Foundation. All of them played an essential role in giving us access, materials and guidance. When you imagine an archive, you usually think of something rigid and restrictive — no drinks, no food, everything behind glass. But these places were the complete opposite. The people running them were incredibly generous, open and kind. For me it was especially meaningful because I had known many of them for years through different contexts, not necessarily through research. We had found each other simply by caring about the same histories. And to experience their readiness to help — giving every bit of information, every permission, every file we needed — was genuinely moving.

What I still feel is missing, though, is a dedicated platform and stronger community structures: spaces, clubs and initiatives that can generate new discourses or push existing conversations further.

KR: I want to return to something I mentioned earlier: as a foreigner coming to different countries to do this research, it’s important to stress that this work isn’t about colonising. It’s about building networks that don’t simply replicate existing ones, like the usual V4 collaborations or EU grant frameworks. It’s a different way of connecting people. 

The fact that the magazine is in English could be seen as a kind of colonisation, but actually it’s just a contemporary, universal language that allows this knowledge to reach more people. Now we are doing this in Hungary, of course, but the bigger goal is to go global — that’s why it’s a magazine, not a book on a single shelf. The magazine is meant to be distributed worldwide, with simple language and an attractive design, so that even readers who don’t yet know if they want to engage with these stories can encounter them in a welcoming, accessible way.

That’s how I started the magazine 20 years ago, right after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts as a painter. I knew that paintings and art have an audience, but a magazine is different: you can share it, sell it, send it to someone. For 20 years, it’s been one of the best ways for me to summarise research. Sometimes it works even better than academic books, which are often niche and inaccessible. The magazine simplifies certain things, but it also makes them accessible to a broader audience. For me, that accessibility is crucial. From there, the discourse can grow more sophisticated, but the fundamental idea remains: the magazine is a platform to share knowledge in a language almost anyone in the world can understand. That’s very important.

GyM: Yeah, and it’s important to stress how difficult it has always been for Eastern European artists — especially those from a country like Hungary, with a language nobody else in the world speaks or understands — to gain international visibility. There were so many incredible artists here, but outside the region nobody had any idea who the fuck they were. Placing them in a larger context is crucial, because then you see that even during socialism these scenes were far more complex than what Western audiences usually imagine. 

Take El-Kazovsky for instance: hardly anything exists about him in English. In this issue, we’re publishing a long, beautiful interview that he gave a few weeks before he died, which summarises his entire artistic worldview. The same goes for Hopp-Halász. He was making work that in many ways paralleled iconic Western gay artists like Robert Mapplethorpe — yet almost nobody would think that such things were happening at all behind the Iron Curtain. Even Hungarians often don’t know. So making these stories accessible is essential. It makes Eastern Europe look far more interesting and layered than how it’s usually represented.

MR: I can’t wait to read the interviews, research and historical materials in the magazine. It will be released on the 28th of November, right?

GyM: Yes, the launch event will take place on Trafó’s main stage. Both Karol and I will be there, joined by László Láner, the editor-in-chief of Mások. The evening will be hosted by visual artist Olivér Horváth.

KR: After the launch, the magazine will begin its tour. I’ve invited Gyula to give a talk at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm at the beginning of next year as part of my solo exhibition and then we’ll do an event in Warsaw as well. So this issue—and the research behind it—will continue to appear in international contexts, within major museums and ongoing discussions.