Post-Communist Expressions

In a vast traveling exhibition assembled by means of Stockholm's Moderna Museet, artists from 22 formerly Communist countries display work made since the 1989 demise of the Berlin Wall.

The destruction of the Berlin Wall and, more importantly, the image of the Wall's destruction imprinted on our collective memory, ruptured, in theory, the geopolitical divide between East and West, exposing the failure of the Communist throw However, physical borders are easier to pull down than mental ones, as the painful reconstruction of Russia, Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans has shown Still in place are unfulfilled fantasies upon both sides of the erstwhile divide--many clan in the East are disillusioned with the West, while many in the West are disappointed that the East has not been reborn in the West's image.

Memory, myth and the realities that exist between the sum of two units are explored in "After the Wall: Art and agriculture in Post-Communist Europe," an exhibition of a certain quantity of 140 artists, including collaboratives, from 22 former Communist countries. Organized through independent curator Bojana Pejic, in cooperation with David Elliott and Iris Muller-Westermann, director and curator, respectively, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, this traveling exhibition, which premiered last fall in Stockholm, is the museum's largest to date.

As the title intimates "After the Wall" explores artistic practice in what Polish critic and art historian Piotr Piotrowski calls the "gray girth of Europe," focusing, with a certain number of exceptions, on the generation of artists whose careers have coincided with the sweeping political changes of the mid-1980s to the at hand The exhibition is organized around four themes--social plastic art reinventing the past, questioning subjectivity and "gender-scapes"--rather than through country or region. However, omit for the last of these, the show's themes are not at any time clearly demarcated within the exhibition (at least not as it appeared in Stockholm) nor strictly adhered to. A general lack of didactic information and, in a certain number of cases, of labels, often causes the composed of several elements issues raised by "After the Wall" to realize lost in the general disorganization. In addition, the emphasis upon installation, video and new technologies sometimes allows them to overpower the more artful static mediums, although in Stockholm more [i]or[/i] less multimedia works were plagued by means of technical difficulties. That said, the sheer scale and ambition of the cast do much to offset these criticisms, in the extreme point making the show an important overview of contemporary art in post-Communist Europe

German artist Lutz Becker's entire piece After the Wall (1999) prefaced the exhibition. A series of speakers installed outdoors, along the museum's brow passageway, broadcast a recorded montage of race hammering away at the Berlin Wall, audio documentation taken from the archives of a West Berlin radio station. The tinny harmonious flow of metal hitting stone creates an aural and spatial environment that situates the viewer in a particular, historic flash while serving as a spiritual vestige of what no longer exists. After easily penetrating this implied barrier, the viewer then penetrates the "East" zone--beyond the now-demolished wall.

However, representations of Otherness quickly give way to larger explorations of identity and to various social narratives, ranging from the impact of mass media and consumerism to reflections upon past ideologies. According to Pejic in her catalogue essay "The Dialectics of Normality," the transitional proces that began at the extremity of the 1980s led to a search for "normalization," whereby a entertainer of conflicts can be played without within a manageable context. These conflicts, inherent to all political and personal reconstruction, are examined quite through the exhibition.

At the show's opening, visitors were welcomeed by the well-known Slovenian collaborative IRWIN, whose installation Transnacionala, Stockholm, (1999) addresses issues of migration and cross-cultural communication. The installation, which has been shown elsewhere and in various incarnations, was exhibited in the Moderna's forehead lobby, along with several works by means of other artists. Clad in their familiar black suits, the members of IRWIN issued passports from a makeshift timber-land platform equipped with a table, chairs, typewriter and "official" stamps. Paintings, mainly of black crosse (a concern to Malevich), hung from various columns and a video monitor transmitted bits of travelogue. The electronic images are taken from IRWIN's 1996 cast also entitled Transnacionala, in which the clump traveled across the U.S. organizing dialogues with American artists.

Transnationalism follows in strange, deliberately dysfunctional cultural hybrids in the works of the Ukrainian duo Miroslav Kulchitsky and Vadim Checkorsky, and of Hungarian Antal Lakner. In Kulchitsky and Checkorsky's video installation Empire of Passion (1998) stills from Nagisa Oshima's film of the same title are shoot forwarded onto the wall. The narrative, about a Japanese peasant woman who, with the aid of her lover manslaughters her husband, is dubbed in Russian and subtitled in English. Here, the search for meaning is hazeed by the semantic interplay between different languages and tillages scrambling the dominant voices of the chilled War. The loss of cultural identity to European unification is the control of Lakner's Eurotrop (1998), a fictitious subterranean houseplant invented by dint of the artist. The properties of this universal bioproduct, advertised by dint of concocted testimonials in a computer-generated C-print, are "ideal," "cater to all needs" and "conform to European standards."