Excellencies, distinguished guests, dear friends,

Good evening, and a very warm welcome to all of you at the Amrita Sher-Gil Cultural Centre of the Embassy of India here in Budapest.

It gives me great pleasure to open this exhibition of paintings by Ms. Eva-Maria Biribauer, an artist whose own life already carries something of the spirit this centre was built to celebrate. Ms. Biribauer divides her time between Germany, Austria, Hungary and India, and that movement across borders runs straight through her canvases. Her work displayed here draws on Indian conceptions of time and space, on the idea, so central to Indian thought, that time is not a straight line marching forward but something closer to a river, doubling back on itself, folding one moment into another. It is a way of seeing that has occupied Indian poets and philosophers for thousands of years, and it is a genuine pleasure to see it taken up now by a European artist and given form in paint and colour.

Budapest does not need to be told that it loves art. Anyone who has spent an evening at the Hungarian State Opera, or an afternoon in the Museum of Fine Arts, or simply wandered the galleries that line the streets of the Sixth and Seventh districts, knows this already. This is a city that looks at paintings closely, and with opinions of its own. To bring an exhibition to Budapest is to bring it before an audience that will actually look, and look carefully. That is not a small thing for any artist, and I suspect Ms. Biribauer knows it too.

There is a long history binding Indian and Hungarian art together- most of it drawn by women. Even this centre carries that history in its very name. Amrita Sher-Gil was born in this city in 1913, to an Indian father and a Hungarian mother, and she went on to become one of the founding figures of modern Indian painting. She trained in Paris, but it was India, its colour, its light, its people, that gave her work its final shape, and today many of her paintings hang in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, counted among India's national art treasures. She was, in a sense, Budapest's gift to Indian art.

But the exchange ran in both directions. Around the same years Amrita Sher-Gil was finding her voice, two other Hungarian painters, Elizabeth Sass-Brunner and her daughter Elizabeth Brunner, were making the opposite journey. They travelled to India between the two World Wars and effectively never left. India's temples, its landscapes, its spiritual life, held them in a way their homeland apparently could not, and they spent the rest of their lives painting what they found there. Elizabeth Brunner was later honoured by the President of India with the Padma Shri, one of the country's highest civilian awards, for a body of work that had, by then, become as much a part of India's visual memory as of Hungary's.

I find something quite moving in that exchange. One Hungarian family gave India a painter who helped shape its modern art. Another gave Hungary two painters who spent their lives trying to understand India from the inside. Art, it turns out, does not much care about passports. It moves toward whatever holds it, and it carries people along with it. That, really, is what tonight is about. Ms. Biribauer's paintings continue a conversation that started in this very city more than a hundred years ago, between two very different ways of seeing the world that keep finding, again and again, that they have something to say to each other.

This centre was founded to give that conversation a home, and I think it has done rather more than that over the years. What began as a centre for Indian arts in Budapest has become something a little larger than its name suggests. It has become a place where Budapest's own cultural life shows up alongside India's, where Hungarian musicians share a stage with Indian ones, where local scholars and visiting curators sit in the same room, and where, as we see tonight, an Austrian painter can hold an exhibition inspired by Indian philosophy in a hall named after a Hungarian-Indian artist. We did not plan that from the start. It happened because Budapest kept showing up, kept bringing its own artists and its own curiosity through these doors, until the centre stopped being only ours and became, in a real sense, the city's as well. I am proud of that, and I think it is worth saying out loud, on an evening like this one.

So let me close where I should. To Ms. Biribauer, thank you for bringing your work to Budapest, and for the years of looking and thinking that clearly sit behind it. I wish you every success with this exhibition, and I hope it finds, here of all places, an audience that understands exactly what you are reaching for.

And to all of you, thank you for being here this evening, for your time and your interest, and for the simple fact that you chose to spend part of this evening looking at paintings rather than doing any of the hundred other things you might have done instead. That, more than anything else, is what keeps a place like this alive.

Please enjoy the evening, and the paintings.

Thank you.