Kata Benedek

Bio

Kata Benedek is a Hungarian art historian and freelance journalist with a PhD from Berlin’s Freie Universität. Her research explores the geopolitical temporalities and modalities of socialist and post-socialist East Central European queer cultural history, particularly within the discursive biases of the East-West epistemic binary. Her journalism explores the intersection of culture and politics.

Research project

To support my upcoming projects, I propose two maybe surprisingly interrelated topics - (1) state socialist queer representation and (2) the figure of György Aczél - centered around the contemporary understanding of state-socialist censorship through a particular lens of Miklós Haraszti and his seminal work, The Aesthetics of Censorship/ The Velvet Prison. Artists Under State Socialism. In revisiting certain aspects of censorship’s mechanisms and effects, my inquiry combines theoretical approaches with pre-existing evidence-based, pragmatic reconstructive research in the intersection of political, legal, social, and cultural realities.