This collection of the historian, teacher and politician Milan Hübl consists of a unique collection of archive materials, which includes the correspondence and documentation of the Political University of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and a large collection of ego documents, samizdat volumes and materials related to Charter 77, the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS).

The exhibition took place in the period 1–14 April 1991 at the Art Galleries of the City of Bucharest and displayed watercolours from the Gheorghe Leahu Collection representing streets and old edifices in the Bucharest city centre. This area was severely affected by the so-called “urban systematisation,” a process that entailed the demolition of large parts of the city centre in order to make room for the socialist centre which was meant to show the grandiose character of what official propaganda labelled as the “the Golden Age.” Many of the watercolours on display portrayed famous historic monuments destroyed by this policy of the Ceauşescu regime such as: the Văcăreşti Monastery, the Sfânta Vineri (Saint Friday) Church, the Mina Minovici Institute of Forensic Medicine, and the Operetta Theatre. As a symbolic gesture made by the author, those watercolours that represented demolished edifices were displayed wearing a black bow to emphasise their loss for the city’s heritage.

The magazine Literatura şi arta came to be the pièce de résistance of the Marian Zulean collection. Out of the more than 400 documents that the collection included at its largest extent, almost half were archived copies of this magazine, which was published in Chişinău and reached Romania before 1989 by means of subscriptions at the Romanian Post Office.

At the same time, as regards the material from which it was made, this magazine was also in the most precarious condition, as it was just printed on extremely fragile newsprint. “Literatura şi arta had a high potential to be destroyed or to disappear. Which indeed happened,” says Marian Zulean. In the first place, with the moving of the whole private archive that makes up this collection from Marian Zulean’s home in Craiova to that of his parents in the country, some publications deteriorated, especially Literatura şi arta. Then, as interest in the issues exposed in this magazine diminished significantly after the first years from the fall of communism, the attention given to this publication also decreased dramatically. On top of that, in the Romanian countryside there are other ways of making use of newsprint than might occur to a reader or a historian. “I can imagine that, as newsprint is porous and can preserve certain products relatively well, it may have been used to make sui generis wrappings to keep eggs. The fact is that the vast majority of the issues of the magazine that I gathered in the period when I lived in Craiova have disappeared,” remarks Marian Zulean.

The Law on Stasi Records entered into force as from 29 December 1991 and provides a framework for the processing of files of the secret police of the GDR. It offers a basis for the activities of the Federal Commissioner for Stasi Records (BStU) and is a direct result of pressure from the civil committees which illegally occupied offices of the Ministry for State Security across the GDR in December 1989. As a result of hunger strikes by members of the civil committees in September 1990, a proposal for the administration and preservation of Stasi documentation was added to the German Treaty, creating in the process, a Special Commissioner of the German Federal Government for Stasi Records. Since the passing of the Law on Stasi Records, the employees of the BStU (as of 2016) have processed more than 6.5 million requests to view Stasi documents.

Vasyl Stus was an iconic figure of the human rights movement in Soviet Ukraine and one of the leading Ukrainian poets of his generation. Volumes of his poetry circulated widely through samizdat in the 1960s-1980s. While conducting searches, the KGB would  find his works in the homes of every writer, artist, chemist, and human rights activist, whose activities were cause for concern. As with many writers, Stus’s struggle with the Soviet regime, particularly his brutal incarceration and torture in a Soviet prison camp, which led to his death in 1985, have in many ways overshadowed his human and artistic legacy. The Vasyl Stus Collection at the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature in Kyiv was donated by the Stus family after Ukrainian independence in 1991, with the aim of popularizing and making more accessible his writings. These materials include previously unknown works, volumes of Stus’s vast correspondence, as well as fragments of writings that survived his imprisonment in strict-regime hard labor camps in Mordovia and Perm.

The collection of photographs by Croatian conceptual artist Tomislav Gotovac presents four performances (Reading the Newspapers, Listening to the Radio, Watching Television and Telephoning) from the 1980 and 1981 in which the artist awaited the death of Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito, thus underscoring the social and media psychosis of that moment. The work used a subversive strategy by which the artist indirectly drew the public and socialist regime into the performance, leaving them to think: what is the artist showing?

The Archive of Opposition is one of the oldest activities of the KARTA Centre. It was established in 1991 as “The Archive of the Polish People’s Republic” and gathered all the materials concerning political life in Poland since 1956 to 1989, especially in connection to the events of 1956, 1968, 1970, 1980. In 1998 the archive changed its name to “The Archive of Opposition”, which reflects greater awareness of the specificity of the opposition in the Polish People’s Republic: its diversity extending beyond merely political actions. In the Archive researchers and journalists can find a very rich, written and visual material on the newest Polish political and social history.

The monumental exhibition, accompanied by a thick catalogue of essays and interviews, was curated by three prominent staff members of the Hungarian National Gallery. Their goal in the retrospective was to give a comprehensive overview of those progressive (modernist, avant-gardist) tendencies, from an art historical vantage that were not really present in the official exhibitions of the period.

The exhibition organizers selected pieces from the sixties belonging to the new tendencies mentioned in the subtitle of the show—the “hidden dimensions” revealed in the catalogue essay of László Beke—and presented them in an iconographic-thematic arrangement. Although the majority of the works were related to avant-gardist endeavors (like those of Péter Donáth, Miklós Erdély, Gyula Konkoly, Dóra Maurer, Gyula Pauer, Péter Türk, Tamás Szentjóby), the notion of hidden dimensions was interpreted to allow for “third way” modernist masters to appear in the selection as well, like Béla Kondor and Tamás Vígh.

According to critics, the arrangement of the productions of several generations, based on stylistic tendencies, generated sometimes unexpected, other times experimental collisions, differentiated even in relation to avant-gardism. Works could appear in the selection based not only on their individual merit, but on their relationship with other works, causing some achievements to be played down, while representing others beyond their merits.

More than two-thirds of the works were selected from the Contemporary Collection of the Hungarian National Gallery, so some of the critics noted that not all participants could “bring” their “best form.” On the other hand, it is refreshing that the exhibition legitimized not only the works and the artists, but also often criticized the former collecting policies of the institution. Although the works were not acquired at the time of their creation, it was manifest that the curators made many efforts to fill the earlier gaps.

National Commission of "Solidarity" Trade Union collects, develops, stores, and publishes archival materials of the Independent Self-governing Labour Union "Solidarity”, primarily from the 1976-1990 period. The Archives are located at the National Commission of "Solidarity" head office and serve the purpose of documenting the social phenomenon of democratic opposition in Poland, in particular in the 1980s. Apart from documents it holds audio and video recordings, photographs, and other items. The Archives continuously add and digitise new, both private and institutional, collections from various parts of Poland.