NYC New Museum: Ostalgia

Dear Colleagues, 

FYI:

 


"Ostalgia" 


 
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The New Museum presents "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.

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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.

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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.

 

 Phil Collins, still from Marxism Today (Prologue), 2010
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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.

 

 

 
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mages/homepage_nm_logo.png&sa=X&ei=tqkdTuu-BMbu0gGQjPHnBw&ved=0CAQQ8wc4ZA&us
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A  L  T  E  R  N  A  T  I  V  E    S  P  A  C  E  S

Anna P. Sokolina, PhD / Executive Editor

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