OSTALGIA
14 July - 25 September, 2011
This summer, the New Museum will present "Ostalgia,” an exhibition that
brings together the work of more than thirty artists from twenty
countries across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics.
Contesting the format of a conventional geographical survey, the
exhibition will include key works produced by Western European artists
who have depicted the reality and the myth of the East.
The exhibition takes its title from the German word ostalgie, a term
that emerged in the 1990s to describe a sense of longing and nostalgia
for the era before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. Twenty years ago,
a process of dissolution began, leading to the break-up of the Soviet
Union and the many other countries that had been united under socialist
governments. From the Baltic republics to the Balkans, from Central
Europe to Central Asia, entire continents and nations were reconfigured,
their constitutions rewritten, their borders redrawn. "Ostalgia” looks
at the art produced in and about some of these countries, many of which
did not even exist two decades ago. Mixing private confessions and
collective traumas, the exhibition describes a psychological landscape
in which individuals and entire societies try to negotiate new
relationships to history, geography, and ideology.
The works in "Ostalgia”—both from the East and West—describe the
collapse of the Communist system while offering a series of personal
reportages on aspects of life under Communism and in the new post-Soviet
countries. In particular, the survey exposes the peculiar place that
artists came to occupy in socialist countries, acting simultaneously as
outcasts, visionaries, and witnesses. "Ostalgia” does not make a case
for a unified history of art in the former Eastern Bloc, but instead
illuminates similar atmospheres and sensibilities across nations and
histories: It is an exhibition that is more about a state of mind than a
specific place in time.
Some of the preoccupations that seem to unite the artists in "Ostalgia”
are a romantic belief in the power of art as a transformative, almost
curative agent; an obsession with language and particularly with its
propagandistic use; the conception of a new aesthetic of the body to
contrast with the heroic bodies of Socialist Realism; a fascination for
the ruins of history as represented by monuments and architectural
vestiges; and an understanding of the artwork as a form of sentimental
documentary that mediates between cultural pressures and individual
anxieties. By combining seminal figures from the 1970s and 1980s, along
with the work of younger artists, "Ostalgia” does not follow a simply
chronological perspective, establishing instead a series of dialogues
between different generations and distant geographies. Exposing local
avant-garde practices and discovering international affinities,
"Ostalgia” composes an imaginary landscape, tracing the cartography of a
dream that haunted the East, for ultimately "Ostalgia” is an exhibition
about myths and their demise.
"Ostalgia” is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions.
www.newmuseum.org
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