History Lesson: Queer visibility in Ukraine and Hungary

A Brief Queer History of Ukraine

The talk “A Brief Queer History of Ukraine” explores the histories of queer communities and artistic practices in Ukraine across different historical periods, drawing on Shebetko’s recently curated group exhibition “A Heart That Beats: Focus on Queer Ukrainian Art” at Schwules Museum in Berlin.

Through selected artworks, archival materials, and lived histories, the talk traces how queer expression has persisted despite censorship, erasure, and political repression. It reflects on the challenges of researching and exhibiting queer art from Ukraine, particularly in relation to gaps in archives and dominant historical narratives.

Do you think it could become a crime?

“Do you think it could become a crime?” This is a question often asked abroad in light of Hungary’s increasingly pronounced anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in recent years.

In response to the government’s ongoing efforts to render queer people invisible, perhaps most visibly marked by last year’s attempt to ban Budapest Pride, Gyula Muskovics and Karol Radziszewski recently presented DIK Fagazine #15: Budapest Issue—an unprecedented publication “filled with dicks and sweaty bodies of all kinds, alongside solid archival research on girls, boys, and trans folks fucking around and subverting the system from the 19th century to the present.”

On the occasion of the third and final history lesson in “The Classrom”, Muskovics reflects on the complex situation of queer culture in Budapest. Placing contemporary underground art circles in dialogue with the semi-public countercultural practices of the ‘70s and the ‘80s, his talk frames subversion as a form of queer world-making.