Party, as a cultural phenomenon, is a community-based form of resistance that draws inspiration from African tribal music and rituals. House music typically pulsates at a beat rate between 110 and 130 beats per minute, while techno ranges from 130 to 150, other genres spanning an even wider spectrum. Artists use electronic instruments such as drum machines, sequencers, synthesizers, and digital audiovisual workstations. Since the 1980s, it has become a global movement, transcending national and linguistic boundaries. Techno is universal yet localized; it's present everywhere but truly at home nowhere.

Electronic dance music arrived in Hungary through Berlin, as young people emerging from behind the Iron Curtain after the fall of communism first experienced the intoxicating rhythm of “Western” freedom. Tamás Király's underground fashion designer birthday party, held at the Young Artists' Club in Budapest on September 13, 1989, is considered the first Hungarian acid party.

How did the global electronic dance wave become part of our culture? What do punks have to do with techno? How did rave appear on the banks of the Danube, on Frank Hill, in Viking, at the first Tilos parties, in the Buda Castle Labyrinth, in the Kiscelli Crypt, in the Tárnok quarry, and in Budapest's baths? What did community party organization, free from economic interests, mean? What did an electronic dance music gathering look like without genre boundaries?

The "Party Memory Collection" exhibition explores precisely these questions. Not as a traditional research exhibition, but rather as a perception-based process exhibition, where the cacophony of the early party scene comes to life and takes shape in the industrial spaces of the Inota Power Plant's spare parts warehouse. Beyond archival materials, the installations also showcase contemporary practices rooted in party culture that have become an integral part of the art world over the past thirty years.

Cink(Zn), DJ Dork, Peter Kozma Archive, PPML, and XLab + Naphon, along with their peers, represent the pioneering line that shaped the evolution of Hungarian party culture. These groups contributed not only with music but also with visual arts, lighting and smoke techniques, party projections, decorations, and costumes to the atmosphere of the early underground electronic music scene.

This exhibition is more than a retrospective: it's a research project where visitors can become part of this living cultural heritage through memory sharing and community participation. The Party Archive Research Group aims to interpret the party as a source shaping visual and digital culture in the context of contemporary art history.