PROFILE // Mental States: For painter Janos Korodi, home—and freedom—are in the mind

Motion Picture_12 by Janos Korodi

by Ginger Rudolph

EXCERPT //

“Artist Janos Korodi speaks of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 with a series of sighs and a quiet empathy for his father, who, unjustly subjected to foreign domination and oppression over his lifetime, fell into what Korodi calls, ‘a life of hopelessness.’

Korodi was born in 1971 in Budapest, Hungary, but ultimately he couldn’t stay and suffer the same fate. As he saw Hungary’s new and fragile democracy collapsing around him in 2010, he knew he had to leave.

‘I refused to repeat the life of our parents’ generation,’ he says, ‘the people who were born around World War II, who have lived most of their lives under the Soviet regime, the ones who deserve to be called the actual victims of the Russian-type communist experiment in Hungary, and the countries of the Eastern Bloc.’ …

Days after I spoke with Korodi I couldn’t get ‘a life of hopelessness’ out of my head.

‘...it’s something one can’t imagine without being touched by it. The communist, fascist regime was best described by George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, and many more, of course,’ Korodi had told me. ‘There will always be opposition and organizing activists, but it gets more and more like a network of self-care of the society that lacks the power to restore democracy. I can’t tell how it altered our parents’ lives… I just know that it’s crippling, and I know that the system in place now works the same way the system worked then.’”

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