NEW YORK, NY.- A lecture by noted artist and filmmaker Péter Forgács on The Archaeology of Memory will take place at The Jewish Museum on Wednesday, March 18 at 6:30 pm. Mr. Forgács will discuss the relationship between memory and art in his work. The program also includes a screening of his film, The Maelstrom - A Family Chronicle (The Netherlands, 1997, 60 minutes), which interweaves home movies of a Dutch family ultimately deported to Auschwitz with those of the family of the German wartime governor of occupied Holland. This lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition, The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River, By Peter Forgács and The Labyrinth Project, on view at The Jewish Museum from March 15 to August 2, 2009. The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street.

Tickets are $15 for the general public; $12 for students and seniors; and $10 for Jewish Museum members. For further information regarding programs at The Jewish Museum, the public may call 212.423.3337. Tickets for programs at The Jewish Museum can now be purchased online at the Museum’s Web site, www.thejewishmuseum.org.

The exhibition and lecture are part of Extremely Hungary, a yearlong festival showcasing contemporary Hungarian arts.

Péter Forgács (b. 1950) is a media artist and independent filmmaker based in Budapest, whose works have been exhibited worldwide. Since 1978 he has produced over thirty films. He is best known for his haunting films that reorchestrate found footage, particularly the Private Hungary series of award winning films based on home movies from the 1930s and 1960s, which document ordinary lives that were soon ruptured by historic events occurring off screen. His work is in the collections of such museums as the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou & Museé d’Art Moderne and The Getty Museum Special Collection.

The exhibition and lecture are part of Extremely Hungary, a yearlong festival showcasing contemporary Hungarian visual, performing, and literary arts in New York and Washington, D.C., throughout 2009. The festival is organized by the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York, which sponsors a range of programs celebrating Hungary’s past, present and future, and is made possible in part by funding from the Hungarian Ministry of Education and Culture. For more information, please visit the festival’s website at www.extremelyhungary.org.

The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River, by Peter Forgács and The Labyrinth Project is a video installation - a collaboration between one of Europe's best-known filmmakers and The Labyrinth Project at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts - built around original 8-mm film shot by Captain Nándor Andrásovits, an amateur filmmaker who ferried fleeing refugees to safety along the Danube River during World War II. The installation, which grew out of a film by Forgács, immerses visitors in three interwoven historical narratives which they access with a touch screen computer and see on five large screens. One narrative tells of Jews trying to escape Nazi persecution in 1939 by reaching a ship on the Black Sea bound for Palestine. The second story focuses on émigré German farmers after the 1940 Soviet re-annexation of Bessarabia. They abandoned their adopted homes to return to the "safety" of the Third Reich, but instead were relocated to occupied Poland. Captain Andrásovits and the river are the subjects of the third story.