The occasion for the art competition, announced in the August 14 issue of The New York Review of Books, was to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the 1956 revolution in Hungary and was sponsored by Timothy Garton Ash, Danilo Kis, George Konrad, and Susan Sontag.
The artworks were meant to be exhibited and then auctioned to raise funds for the illegally working civil organization Foundation for the Poor (SZETA).
[1] The authorities, mandated by the regime to suppress the memory and even the mention of the revolution, did everything to make the exhibition impossible: they threatened the members of Inconnu and made sure that the mailed art pieces never reach their destination.
[4] The authorities later decided that the objects did not meet the standards of public taste in terms of design and material, had no financial value therefore cannot be put on the market, and shredded them.
[4] What other remains from this banned and annihilated exhibition are the catalogs[5] and a voice recording[6] of an Inconnu member reading the names of the exhibiting artists – including Mária Antalffy, Péter Bokros, Attila Dócs, Glenn Helm, Ágnes Háy, Jessica Douglas, Jo Siddens, Judith Roberts, Csaba Kiss, Tamás Molnár, Gáspár Nagy, Norman Rubington, Niki van Osten, Sophie Rivera, Imre Szőke, Zsigmond Vörös – from Hungary, Britain, the US, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia, the titles of the works as well as the auction put-up price.