1956–present
Pavol Demeš
Pavol Demeš (born 1956) began as a biomedical researcher and in 1991–1992 became Minister of International Relations of the Slovak Republic. He then headed civic and policy organisations, and since the mid-1990s he has photographed extensively: his exhibitions have been shown in Bratislava, Tokyo, Prague, Rome and other cities.
Biography
The exhibition “The World of Human Faces” first opened in Bratislava in 1995 and then travelled widely: Tokyo, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Mostar, Mobile, Rome. For a man whose public name began in politics, this is a rather unusual second profile.
Pavol Demeš was born on 8 January 1956 in Vráble, in present-day Slovakia. He finished primary school and the gymnasium there. He studied at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Comenius University in Bratislava, and in 1980 he graduated from Charles University in Prague, where he received a doctorate. For ten years after that he worked in a biomedical laboratory at Comenius University. In 1987–1988 he did postgraduate study at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. Probably that was when the American connections took shape that later defined his whole career; I cannot verify this from documents. From 1990 to 1991 Demeš headed the department of foreign contacts at the Slovak Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport. From 6 May 1991 to 24 June 1992 he was Minister of International Relations of the Slovak Republic in the government of Ján Čarnogurský. These were the years after the Velvet Revolution, when Czechoslovakia still existed as a federation; the federal Minister of Foreign Affairs until the country’s dissolution in January 1993 remained Jiří Dienstbier. In 1992 Demeš stood for the National Council for the Civic Democratic Union and was not elected.
In 1993–1996 he headed the foreign policy department in the office of the President of Slovakia and was an adviser to President Michal Kováč. From March 1997 he was director of the Slovak Academic Information Agency (SAIA-SCTS), which he had helped to found as a support centre for the third sector, meaning non-governmental and civic organisations. In 1999 he took part in a research project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
In 2000–2010 Demeš directed the Bratislava office of the German Marshall Fund, responsible for Central and Eastern Europe. He now works there as a Transatlantic Fellow and acts as a foreign policy analyst, cooperating with non-governmental organisations in Slovakia and abroad.
He has been photographing for more than thirty years and has held over thirty exhibitions. After “The World of Human Faces” came “Living Water, Dead Sea” (Košice, 2011), “Pavol of Tarsus” (Bratislava, Rome, Košice, 2012) and “In the Footsteps of Saints Cyril and Methodius” (Bratislava Castle, Slovak National Museum, 2013). In 2010 in Levice he showed an exhibition about the painter Štefan Nécsey (1870–1902), and from 8 to 31 October 2024 “Fragile Beauty”, a joint show with the Romanian ambassador to Slovakia, Călin Fabian, was held at the gallery of the French Institute in Bratislava.
He is the author of several books: “Civic Advocacy, or How to Achieve Social Change” (2000), “Sarajevo” (2010, with Miroslav Mojžita), “Friend, Partner, Ally: The Story of Slovak-American Relations from the Velvet Revolution to the Present” (2010) and “Collective Portrait” (2012). His awards include the EU-US Democracy and Civil Society Award (1998), the USAID Democracy and Governance Award (1999), the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Orange-Nassau (2005) and the Order of the Yugoslav Star, First Class (2005).
Profile notes