Read a review of the publication at Hyperallergic.

Roxana Marcoci: In 1996, during my visit to Bucharest, you and Lia Perjovschi staged the first Open Studio, an interdiscursive forum with artists, curators, and scholars. Did you conceive of the Open Studio to function as an alternative exhibition space? I recall seeing there an installation of costumes that Lia used in her performances. 

Dan Perjovschi: After 1989 we were suddenly in the situation of replacing outdated, impoverished, and conservative institutions. Lia and I were the “art institution.” For fifty years, Romania was cut off from the rest of the world. When we first started to travel, we did not only travel to New York, Paris, or Kassel but also through contemporary art history, through the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s that we did not know (in my art education I barely reached Picasso). It was a fantastic journey. And Lia and I used all our resources (a studio, both our careers) to disseminate the findings. This was the first stage of Lia’s Contemporary Art Archive. We collected stuff (catalogues, flyers, invitations, leaflets) and experiences (what we saw and sometimes how we participated in international projects) and then distributed it through one-on-one discussions or in group gatherings in our studio. The location of the studio was great, in the heart of the city, in the yard of the art academy. In time it became, without intention, a kind of alternative art education, because from each generation of students, some knocked on our door. The conditions were dismal (dust, common toilets, stray dogs, etc.), but we overcame them. We were young, we had energy, and the course of history had changed (fall of dictatorship, freedom of expression), which gave us power.

By 1996, we were in the second phase, organizing lectures and artist talks. We were the first to do so—you and Cristian Alexa, Mike Nelson, some designer from Stockholm, some PhD researcher from Berlin, etc. Remember? We used slides, clack-clack. It was also an underground training for locals on how to make a presentation, how to talk about your art, and also a source of different definitions and understandings of art mediums and practices. I look at the pictures now and see an eighty-year-old Ion Bitzan and some youngsters in their twenties. Our audiences consisted of artists, art critics, and journalists (no curators in the early 1990s). Cultural journalists of all ages came into our studio. We were very media friendly, and we took advantage of the fact that there were not many interesting art events around. 

You have to imagine that the median income was about $200 per month then, and a ticket to fly to New York was $800. Not many artists or journalists had the opportunity to go see Walter De Maria’s Earth Room, for example. We were invited or got grants. So without funding we operated any way we could; if we found out someone was coming to town, we asked him or her to come give a lecture, stuff like that. Conversely, we also operated like an information center for journalists and art professionals who came to Romania. We used to do a crash course in Romanian contemporary art and the political situation for them. We had no fear. I remember one time an American delegation of journalists from the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and ten other U.S. papers coming to our studio, and afterwards they went to meet the president of the country—ha ha. 

When we did an Open Studio, it was a four-day open access to an artist context. We did not stage the studio as an exhibition space. We let the place be as it was: an environment of our ideas, a place no longer to produce art objects but to debate and discuss art. Some of our art was around (like Lia’s paper bodies), but it was more about communicating, meeting, exploring the fantastic potential of contemporary art-making. The Open Studios were enormously successful: we were on all the Romanian TV networks, and we even got a live show on National Public TV Channel 1. Crowds came—and stayed and stayed. We showed stuff, we discussed; a lot of ad hoc roundtable happened.

The practice of open studios came back only recently, as the dearth of exhibition spaces has forced artists to open their studios. But now it’s different; it’s more about the market and selling. Anyway, Lia has some huge panels with hundreds of photographs of these meetings with local and international artists and curators. Until 2005 we did a lot. A lot.

RM: Speaking of nonconformist strategies of display, I can think of exhibitions in which your work was presented exclusively in magazine and book formats, such as in the publications Revista 22, Idea, and Radical Museology, and you have also made drawing installations embedded in the fabric of a city and sketches that take shape directly on institutional walls—at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and MoMA in New York, among many others. Can you speak about these exhibition setups and why are they relevant to your practice?

DP: For a long time I made my living doing drawings for various publications or designing book covers. I am in love with printed matter. For me the newspaper format is one of the best mediums—a four-, eight-, or sixteen-page gallery. I edit my own newspapers that I distribute for free during shows or re-exhibit in various contexts. I have about thirty. Books are another love story. I basically want to buy and have all the books. Every time I enter a great bookshop, I am in awe. For twenty-eight years of my life I barely had access to books due to censorship and lack of money. Now I try to avenge that.

At some point (as was happening with my newspapers) I realized that the book is a great format for my practice. I did several artist books, and more recently I’ve developed some project-books (such as the one with Claire Bishop). Actually, it all started with Claire asking me for some visuals for one of her conferences. 

I am happy to participate in any book or magazine project. I love disseminating my drawings through these platforms. I have gotten requests form PhD researchers who want to use some of my drawings for the covers or interior spreads of their theses to make them more appealing. And I am talking about physics or medical PhDs. People google me, or they see my projects someplace and identify me by my drawings. Just look on Facebook how many of my drawings are used as profile images. I am very happy about all this archipelago of possibilities.

As for drawing on museum walls—well, this is a dream come true. I am still shocked and grateful that I can do this practice. Freestyle. Go and draw whatever I want on museum walls. Fantastic! I use any square meter as a platform for free expression, criticism, and empathy about the complicated world we live in. I draw black and white but with many colorful ideas.

RM: Your witty, poignant drawings and texts focus on issues such as migration, war, capitalism’s one percent, and cutting funding for the arts. As an artist who is an activist, as an activist who is also a journalist, and as a journalist who amplifies the voice of institutional critique, what types of exhibition spaces have proved to be the most progressive in your estimation?

DP: Roxana, I love every space where I am free to express—museums, art centers and galleries, newspapers, books, libraries, and now Facebook. Big museums have big audiences, mixed audiences, family audiences, and international audiences. Small artist-run institutions and galleries have art-focused audiences. Facebook is global, newspapers have their own public, and public space is for everybody (at the São Paulo Biennial, my intervention in the local subway was seen by more people than the biennial itself). I love them all. You know, I am given a kind of wild card; the curator and the museum director do not know what I will draw—neither do I. It’s a trust business. I love this freedom (and the responsibility that comes with it). And because my work is more or less displayed in interstitial spaces (lobbies, stairwells, corridors, glass-walled entrances), my installations are more or less freely accessible; sometimes they are even viewable from outside, such as the outdoor wall at Kunsthalle Basel. The Tate’s exclusive Members Room was open to everybody because of my project. At MoMA, everybody going to see the Richard Serra retrospective had to pass in front of my wall. (Thanks, Richard!) 

I like this distribution of my art and my statements in these in-between spaces. It gives my art a broader meaning, not only within art history but also within activism and—do not laugh—revolution. In the last five or six years I became (due to social media) a sort of drawing provider. People staging a demonstration against the brutal reality of a city, people fighting to save a park, or a Roma-related human-rights group will ask me for a logo or for drawings to be placed on banners. I’ve done a lot of this stuff, and there is quite a feeling when you see the main boulevard in Bucharest occupied by people carrying one of my drawings. I’ve said this several times: I am not an activist, but my drawings are.

RM: In 2001, the Romanian government created the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), and in 2004 the museum moved into a newly constructed wing of the Palace of the Parliament, which was built during the Ceauşescu regime to house the entire administrative apparatus of the state in one enormous building. Due to its controversial location, MNAC quickly became one of the most divisive contemporary art spaces in Eastern Europe. Can you elaborate as to why this was the case?

DP: In general there are problems with all contemporary art museums in Eastern Europe due to their monopoly (one museum per country) and political context. The best model in the region is the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, which has focused on artist archives and has a regional (not national) collection. Getting back to your question regarding MNAC, Lia and I have never stepped foot in that monster. You know there is a huge empty space around that building, which for the past twenty-seven years has been closed to the public, like a private park; the building is like an island circled by a wall. You need five thousand bodies to make a human chain around this wall, and in twenty-seven years, it was done twice: once to demand access to the communist-era secret service files, and the second time to protest against a massive gold mine that would have razed four mountains and left us with the biggest lake full of cyanide in Europe. That protest marked the biggest citizen uprising since the Romanian Revolution. In both cases, contemporary art was not on the side of justice and the people but on the side of corrupt power—inside there, over the wall.

This sheds light on the intellectual condition of an institution born of corrupt power and inhabiting one of the ugliest and most oppressive of buildings. 

I think twelve years after its inauguration, the museum shows its limitations due to its physical location, which as a place where the people have been evicted and is now home to a corrupt parliament, is inextricable from its place in the public psyche. It is an isolated place in the middle of town carrying so much historical weight that nobody can escape it; some “critical” shows have even become intellectual kitsch. The huge space in the parliament building is just part of a monopoly on art spaces. MNAC owns the beautiful Sala Dalles, also located in the middle of town. It’s a marvelous space that has been misused for years to get extra money (rented out for various consumer-goods-related fairs or without a proper exhibition program). MNAC also owns the Anexa, a four-story industrial warehouse converted into a place for young artists’ art (capitalizing on a rough postindustrial look), and it also has some dedicated galleries at the renovated National Theatre in central Bucharest. MNAC is a dominating monster, leaving galleries and artist-run spaces the size of a napkin. Well, size matters, but it can also squash you—just imagine paying the bill to heat those spaces in minus twenty degree Celsius, which isn’t uncommon in Bucharest in winter. And that building is the parliament. Imagine if the U.S. had only a single contemporary art museum, located in the Capitol with a Republican majority. 

The supreme irony here is that the most hated building in Romania has become, over the course of twenty-seven years, heavily promoted by the political power as the embodiment of a national genius in architecture and art. There are forty postcards and numerous fridge magnets featuring the Ceauşescu Parliament Palace. So the building that emptied the refrigerators of our citizens (they paid with hunger and freezing in their apartments) is now occupying the fridge.

Well, I hate that, and I do not want to be represented by MNAC. I refuse it. I boycott it. I make it small and insignificant. I do not show there, I do not sell works to it, I do not collaborate with it—I never step foot in it. Fuck it, and fuck them.

RM: Ten years ago, Romania became an official member of the European Union. How has this shift impacted the reception of contemporary Romanian art? How has the institutional landscape change in the last twenty years? And can we still speak today of “Eastern European” art exhibitions?

DP: At the critical or theoretical level, we can argue, but at the level of art production and budgets, yes, there is still a gap. There is still an invisible wall. Well, if you look at Hungary, there it is not so invisible. As a whole, the East collapsed in the market. The discussion is no longer about freedom but about the collections. Less artist-run spaces, more commercial galleries (and some spectacularly successful ones). There are several new contemporary art museums that have opened in Eastern Europe, but all of them face budget shortages and crushing missions (to research, preserve, restore, collect, and internationally promote their national art). It is a huge mission because in some cases these institutions are alone (one per country) and face reactionary politics (again, Hungary).

For me as an individual, but also for the exchange of art and goods, and the free movement of people, the EU was a blessing. I travel without a visa. I think my projects quadrupled because of this reality.

There is more and more equality in the way we make art, show it, and how we understand it. And this makes me, an artist born, educated, and living in Romania, feel at home in New York, Trondheim, Hong Kong, or São Paulo.

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The 10th Berlin Biennale and Manifesta 12—this year’s editions of two European biennials, both of which were founded after 1989 in response to the new social, cultural, and political realities in the aftermath of the Cold War—have quite a lot in common. They are both relatively small, with fewer than fifty artists and art collectives presented at multiple locations across the two cities; each is curated by a team of creative mediators; each attempts to reverse the usual demographics and name staples of global art exhibitions; and their thematics are subtly yet thoroughly politically engaged. Manifesta’s interdisciplinary curatorial team is composed of Dutch journalist and filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak, Spanish architect Andrés Jaque, Sicilian architect Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, and Swiss contemporary art curator Mirjam Varadinis; and the Berlin Biennial, which is led by South African curator and artist Gabi Ngcobo, includes a curatorial team comprising American-based art historian Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Ugandian poet and curator Serubiri Moses, Brazilian educator Thiago de Paula Souza, and German writer Yvette Mutumba. 

This edition of Manifesta, a nomadic exhibition occurring every two years in a different European city, is titled The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence. It takes place in Palermo (a city in the heart of the Mediterranean and at the crossroad of three continents) and explores coexistence in the natural ecosystem as well as in a world moved by invisible transnational networks of private interests. Tapping on its own multilayer history of continuous migration—from the ancient Greeks, the Arabs, and the Normans to recent arrivals from North Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East—Palermo functions like a “laboratory of diversity,” manifest in the expanded geography of movements and in the roster of artists coming from Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. In comparison to the broadly global scope of Manifesta, the Berlin Biennale offers a more salient, localized representation of artists from Africa, or of African descent living in different parts of the world, many of whom have also taken up residency in countries including South Africa, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, India, Namibia, and the Netherlands, thus reconfiguring a history of repressed aesthetic and political vocabularies. Titled We Don’t Need Another Hero, from Tina Turner’s 1985 eponymous song, the Berlin Biennale proposes (like the song) to reject the desire for a savior in favor of “a plan for how to face a collective madness,” in the face of how to confront international shifts in politics and the rise of new historical figures.

Unfolding across three principal venues in Berlin—the Akademie der Künste (ADK), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (KW), and Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U)—some of the most critically engaged projects cut across political and philosophical narratives. The South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape, for instance, presents a multi-part installation in the largest space at KW with smashed bricks suggesting ruins in different stages of decay, enveloped in an eerie strata of orange light, and footage from one of Nina Simone’s 1976 concerts—an exploration into mental madness that recalls Frantz Fanon’s idea of the intersections between displacement, madness, racism, and the colony. Bopape also has a new, poignantly stylized video work that, during my visit, was screened at ZK/U on the opening two days. Drawing on the 2005–6 trial of former South African president Jacob Zuma for the rape of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, this video addresses the pervasive epidemic of sexual violence against the black female body. Other artists examining the female condition focus on the context of frictional dynamics between the individual and the nuclear family. In a group of photographs titled Frowst and a 16-mm film installation at KW, the Polish artist Joanna Piotrowska (whose work is also currently on view at MoMA in the exhibition Being: New Photography 2018) taps the Family Constellation therapy method developed by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger to build a lexicon of body poses among family members that suggests that the collective is at once hostile and a source of safety. Similarly exploring the relationship between the individual and the social body, the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye on view at ADK include a majestic polyptych A File for a Martyr to a Cause. The work centers on the pensive gaze of four female figures, each with her arms crossed above her head in a gesture that reinterprets a motif in the history of modern art and that taps the uncharted territory of black selfhood.

As in the case of the Berlin Biennale, the artistic projects at Manifesta are spread across the city of Palermo, and while the famous Teatro Garibaldi, a large space situated at the center of La Kalsa, Palermo’s medieval Arab district, functions as the exhibition’s nexus, the venues with the highest concentration of works are the Orto Botanico (Botanical Garden), Palazzo Butera, Palazzo Ajutamicristo, and Palazzo Forcella de Seta. If the Orto Botanico venue comes closest to the biennial’s theme of a planetary garden, with a surprising work by Chinese artist Zheng Bo that explores the potential of eco-queer (the video installed outdoors among bamboo trees shows seven young men walking into a forest in Taiwan and engaging in intimate contact with ferns), it is the Palazzo Ajutamicristo that presents the strongest group of installations. Among them is Lebanese artist Rayyane Tabet’s sculptural work Steel Rings, a sized-down replica of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline that examines the rise and fall of an American venture structure with a length of 1213 km through which oil was transported overland from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon from 1950 to 1983; Filippo Minelli’s Across the Borders, a colorful installation of thirty flags commissioned to individuals living in nations linked by migration policies; Tania Bruguera’s article 11, as much a political as a conceptual document piece about the activist work done in Sicily against the US Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), a harmful global cellular service provider that supports war from a distance; and Trevor Paglen’s It Began as a Military Experiment, a collection of photographic portraits made through an algorithm that identifies key points on a person’s face, thus assisting ethnic and racial profiling. Last year, MoMA acquired this project by Paglen, one of the first photographic works made not for human eyes but for machines, for its permanent collection. 

Finally, at Palazzo Forcella de Seta, Kader Attia’s video installation, The Body’s Legacies: The Post-Colonial Body, takes the current refugee crisis as its subject, reflecting on the repressed human rights during the postcolonial period through interviews with four descendants of colonized people or slaves. The narration focuses on a particular event that occurred in Paris in 2017 when a young man Théo Luhaka was beaten and raped with a truncheon by the policemen arresting him. An equally compelling representation of racism and violence against refugees is offered in Mario Pfeifer’s two-channel video installation Again, which, on view at the Berlin Biennale, revisits a 2016 case involving four men on trial for beating an Iraqi asylum seeker with mental health problems and epilepsy, who they alleged was threatening a supermarket cashier.

The two biennials discussed offer effective counter-narratives to the art histories and politics of Western hegemonic nation-states, setting out to prevent indifference toward the violence that is daily perpetuated around the world, and bring to visibility urgent concerns that impact our culture and societies about migration and climate change, violence against minorities, and human rights. Many of these artists’ projects are inspiring in terms of their sustained discourses around civic agency, and reflect some of the ideas that curators at MoMA have been facing in their own research conducted through the C-MAP initiatives, such as the intent to set up complementary, even counter-narratives of pre-colonial and socialist traditions to Western cultural narratives.

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Ana Janevski: 1989 is not only considered a pivotal year in the reconfiguration of the world political order, it’s often seen as a threshold for all sorts for interrelated social and cultural transformations, the “turn of turns,” as it were. To wit, in your book Too Much World [2014], you take 1989—specifically the Romanian uprising that year, when protesters invaded the state TV studios—as the symbolic beginning of a new visual order. Tell us more about the connections you see between those events and today.

Hito Steyerl: After following the Romanian revolution on TV, Vilém Flusser developed the concept of images that do not record a given situation but which project an expected situation. In 1990 he wrote, “It is the image that now triggers events.”¹ Since then, it has become clear that images do trigger politics, especially images on TV and social media, where formatted data attract followers and create momentum. We neglect this aspect at our own risk: it has been a potent mechanism for populist forces lately. Whatever is circulated on monopolist social-media platforms is, to a certain extent, formatted by algorithms that privilege certain kinds of “content,” creating zones of visibility and invisibility. It is interesting right now to compare the discourse around “fake news” on social media and some TV networks with the memory of state propaganda TV in socialist Romania. I am not saying this is the same—obviously, it is definitely not. But contemporary forms of media are also creating a new set of major social problems in relation to propaganda, censorship, and disinformation, this time on a much wider scale. So will anyone storm Facebook, VKontakte, or Weibo as they stormed the state TV studios during the Romanian revolution? If so, who? Putschists? Protesters? The organized right wing? It is extremely interesting to rewatch [Harun] Farocki and [Andrei] Ujicǎ’s Videograms of a Revolution from this perspective today, because it clearly shows that the storming of the Romanian TV studios was an extremely conflicted event on many levels.

AJ: What about the era before the turning point of 1989, specifically the experience of socialist internationalism—is that important for the current moment, whether in terms of solidarity, people’s struggle for decolonization, alternative routes of cultural exchange, or . . .?

HS: Socialist internationalism was tied both to Industrial Age ideas of workerism and, in most places, to authoritarian top-down modes of governance. Thus, in order for it to make any sense today, it needs to be completely reimagined. It’s like asking: do we still need boats after the Titanic sank? Sure, people do need some sort of flotation device, or some might literally drown, but to build the Titanic anew will not help. Spare parts have been discontinued, and the factory itself turned into a launch support for the oligarch-financed colonization of Mars, staffed by robots.

Roxana Marcoci: Eastern Europe, of course, is part of the global contemporary art scene, perhaps now more so than ever. Given the technological conditions of globalization, would you say that the constant, often undiscerning production—of images, soundbites, texts—leads to further accelerated consumption, in a trajectory we can trace to the late seventeenth century, or are we now in a different place entirely, within an entropic bazaar where the cultural consumer can no longer assimilate culturally or discerningly engage sociopolitically, thus foreclosing the utopian side of commodity production?

HS: If the contemporary art world were a bazaar, that would be great. It would be a market woven by human relations in which people from many walks of life talk to one another and communicate. I would love it if the art world were similar to a čaršija or a souk, and in some parts, it is. But the situation you describe relates to a different part of the art world, which works more like an entropic mall, now constituted to a certain extent by postdemocratic govcorps (government-corporations). Another aspect of this is the mega art fair, with only corporation-size galleries left, booths soon to be manned by bot attendants and stupid AI’s—thus completely eradicating the type of bazaar where traders actually talk to people and the market is created through such human interaction. But cultural consumers will remain, albeit as unemployed populations who need to be pacified through entertainment. And there will always be something interesting, even if it’s not called art, because, after all, humans are curious and imaginative beings.

RM: In nearly all its operational spheres, art in the global age remains defined and prescribed by white masculinist hegemony. Do you find critique, and especially social critique (the art not governed like that, according to Michel Foucault), still an effective way to challenge authorial authority?

HS: Critique is fine, as such; negativity is necessary. But clearly the para-academic habit of “critique” has, within the past few decades, turned into ritual nagging, without any consequences except infighting and division. Let me explain: in specific environments with specific social rules, critique might actually do something. It might act like a contract or software that sets certain actions—change or improvement—in motion. But this environment does not exist (if it ever existed). Critique only becomes active if it is embedded into some kind of social relations that could enforce or at least encourage consequences. This clearly does not apply to most power structures today, which simply couldn’t care less.

So as a kind of dystopian substitute, the habit of critique has, in many cases, deteriorated into shaming and blaming, creating constant purging and fragmentation. Since this type of critique is powerless in relation to power, it starts punching down or sideways. It sometimes manifests as a self-victimization that reeks of entitlement, like a vicious derivative of guilt-driven puritanism. Social media are playing a large part in this development. I think that the most radical and unusual step would not be unlimited further critique, but if for once a couple people agreed on something and focused on building structural agreement among one another.

RM: You ended your text Kobanê Is Not Falling [2014] with a question: “What is the task of art in times of emergency?” What does it mean to be an artist today—in the context of increasing isolationism (Brexit, “America First” foreign policy), the global resurgence of far-right movements, reprisals against minorities, and a relentless drive to expand global capitalism?

HS: In the text you mention, I never answered my own question for a reason. Many of the so-called solutions put forth by the art field during the last twenty years or so, all the big proposals and pretentions, mainly led to grotesquely bloated corporate shows and the “blockbustering” of permanent failure. This is a dead end. Maybe first of all one could just scale back exaggerated expectations and realize that art, after all, is not that important. Maybe what art can do now is what it is best at: look, listen, and interpret with precision, imagine without compromise or fear. But also without being instrumentalized to ever more grandiose ends. This just leads to endless frustration, toxic moralizing, and deadlocks. Deflating art’s pretentions, its blockbusterism, its megalomaniac delusions about its own power would be a first step.

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Reflection by Ksenia Nouril, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow

After weeks spent busy organizing the second C-MAP Central and Eastern European Group trip to Moscow, I found myself on the nine-hour flight from New York, wondering what to do with a brief moment of respite. Running through my mind were the intricacies of our densely packed schedule of meetings with artists and curators, tours of historic cultural sites, visits to museums, and the grand opening of the first Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. There is always so much to do and so little time in a metropolis like Moscow, a city I have come to love dearly through my many visits as an independent scholar and then C-MAP fellow for Central and Eastern European art at MoMA.

I was reminded of Moscow’s entrancing effect when I decided to spend my inflight time re-watching the classic Soviet film Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1981), which tells the story of three young women who have moved to Moscow from the provinces in the 1950s to learn about life and love, often the hard way. The film’s opening credits roll on the backdrop of a bird’s-eye view of Moscow. In the city’s skyline, one can spot the many bridges that cross the Moscow River, a few of the tiered-cake-like buildings known as the Seven Sisters, its wide boulevards, and the vast network of housing blocks that encircle the city center with micro-neighborhoods for the proletariat. Moscow has the reputation for being synonymous with Russia. It is the largest city in the largest country in the world, making it the de facto center of Russian politics, economics, and culture. Moscow monopolizes the country’s and the world’s imagination; however, there is so much more beyond it, spanning a Russian Eurasian landmass from the Gulf of Finland in the west to the Bering Sea in the east.

Yet, Moscow continues to be a major crossroads for people, places, and things traversing the globe. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art actualized this by bringing more than sixty artists from about forty cities to Moscow for the first Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art. This was no easy feat—the result of many months of travel to places with varying languages and customs, in several different time zones. My further comments will focus on just a few artists—both included and excluded in Garage’s Triennial—who caught my attention because of the ways their works navigate complicated geographies.

Based between Dagestan, a republic in the North Caucasus region, and Moscow, Taus Makhacheva mines the histories of her family and her country in multimedia works that engage the viewer through impassioned narrative and performance. Makhacheva screened several films for the C-MAP Central and Eastern European Group, including Tightrope (2015), which most recently was exhibited in the main pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale. Delving deep into personal archives, the artist researched the lives of tightrope walkers and aligned their previously invisible history with that of the precarity of the art collections in the underfunded and underappreciated regional museums across the former Soviet Union. In the film, a tightrope walker individually carries one of several dozen works from the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts, named after P. S. Gamzatova, across a sizeable gap between two cliffs. While the elevation goes unstated, it is clear that he is performing a feat of epic proportions. Seemingly futile, the tightrope walker’s action metaphorically points to the urgent need for “keepers” of cultural histories, as Makhacheva herself dedicates much of her work to questioning the parameters of such histories and the role of the artist in their preservation. The film is often accompanied by a performance entitled On the Benefits of Pyramids in Cultural Education, Strengthening of National Consciousness, and the Formation of Moral and Ethical Guideposts, in which acrobats, hired locally at the site of the given exhibition, restage this symbolic movement of paintings in a gymnastics routine.

Sergey Sapozhnikov is a photographer based in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, not far from the Ukrainian and Georgian borders. When Sapozhnikov is not shuttling back and forth to Moscow, where he often exhibits, he is photographing his hometown and the cities beyond. His book The City, published in 2016, is composed of black-and-white photographs of freestanding houses, apartment complexes, garages, commercial buildings, and other similar structures in various states of disrepair in Rostov-on-Don; Samara, in the Volga region; and Vladivostok, in the far east of Russia. On the one hand, the photographs document the everyday in Russia today. On the other hand, they also capture an absence, as the figure—human or animal—is conspicuously missing. Unfortunately, the C-MAP Central and Eastern European Group was unable to meet with Sapozhnikov on this trip—having met him on our first trip to Russia in 2015—since he was home in Rostov-on-Don, working on his next project. However, we visited his exhibition The Drama Machine at the gallery at the Udarnik Cinema with Teresa Mavica, director of the V-A-C Foundation, which has supported Sapozhnikov’s work in the past. Through both color and black-and-white photographs, the photographs in The Drama Machine capture the Maxim Gorky Drama Theater, designed by the architects Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh in the early 1930s in the Sapozhnikovs’ native Rostov-on-Don. The Constructivist-inspired building itself figures in only a few of the photographs, along with some archival materials, but it serves as inspiration for the artist’s own constructions, namely, images of what appear to be found or partially staged heaps of garbage—wooden pallets, metal crates, bolts of fabric—on and around which actors and dancers—his acquaintances—play in a phantasmagoric mise-en-scène.

Upon hearing his life story, one can say that Haim Sokol is a professional migrant. Born in the northern city of Arkhangelsk to a displaced Ukrainian-Jewish family, Sokol lived in Israel for sixteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union before relocating, in 2001, to Moscow, where he still lives and works. Thus, it is not surprising that Sokol’s work is preoccupied with the topics of dislocation and self-identity. For his film I am Spartacus (2012), the artist hired economic migrants to reenact the iconic scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 Hollywood classic Spartacus. As in the original, these men, who come to Moscow from Central Asia for better yet still low-paying manual-labor jobs, join forces in claiming to be Spartacus, the slave who led the uprising against the Roman Republic around 111 BC. They are stronger together than on their own. The two-minute-and-seven-second film is short but powerful, as the viewer is swept away in solidarity. In keeping with his nomadic lifestyle, Sokol was between studios earlier this year, and so we met him in the Garage Education Center, where he screened his films and shared his installations and works on paper with us. We previously met Sokol on our 2015 trip to Moscow, when we saw his work Well (2013) in a group exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. It comprises hundreds of photographic portraits that Sokol had collected over the years, which are laid inside a large, open-top structure that invites the viewer to peek inside and contemplate the histories and fates of these anonymous subjects.

Reflection by Sara Bodison

A few days before our trip to Moscow, the C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Group had a chance to meet with artist and human rights activist Victoria Lomasko. She was in New York promoting her new book Other Russias and drawing a site-specific mural for an exhibition of her work Unwanted Women at Ortega y Gassett Projects in Brooklyn.

Other Russias is the first collection of Lomasko’s graphic reportage, a body of work that she produced between 2008 and 2016. It features drawings she made directly from life, capturing everything from protests and political trials in Moscow to people she met during her travels across Russia—everyone from school teachers in small villages to sex workers in dying industrial towns to juveniles in a drawing class she taught at a detention center. She said she allows her subjects to review and approve their own words, which she uses as captions. Lomasko explains that by documenting her subjects through drawing, rather than through photography or video, she aims “to break through to a more direct grasp and reflection of the reality around me.” Beginning in 2012 Lomasko curated The Feminist Pencil, a series of exhibitions (and related publications) showcasing socially engaged graphic art by women—from manga to graffiti. When we were in Moscow we met with her co-curator for the exhibition, Nadia Plungian, a historian, artist, and activist whose current research focuses on LGBT history in Russia and queerness and masculinity of female figures in Soviet socialist realism.

We also saw sixteen of Lomasko’s drawings of protestors demonstrating for and against Pussy Riot (among other issues) featured in the inaugural Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art in Moscow. They were on view in a gallery devoted to one of the exhibition’s thematic vectors—“Art in Action”—featuring eleven artists and collectives who “intend to be catalysts for social change.” At the center of this gallery were four sewing-machine stations, where Shvemy sewing cooperative performed 12-Hour Workday, re-creating and critiquing a real workday at a sweatshop, on opening weekend. Over the course of the long day, they worked rapidly in an assembly line to produce fanny packs, taking just three bathroom breaks and a fifteen-minute lunch break, and speaking only of work. The next day they sold the packs, which they had emblazoned with the phrase “Made in Slavery,” for forty-four rubles each—the average sum a Russian worker is paid per garment. The collective takes the sweatshop as the subject of its work because they believe it is “the main place where poverty is propagated today, as well as being a place of subjection to the powers that have created and maintained such labor conditions.”

An adjacent vector titled “Personal Mythologies” featured the work of Gentle Women group, who examine gender issues through the “complex of myths, ideas and common beliefs about what women are. . . .” The video Bread and Salt shows a woman salting the sea, remnants from another performance, archival images, and a visitor’s review, which states: “This is exactly what a woman should do, something that looks beautiful, but is in fact pretty useless. Spending time and energy on salting the sea but forgetting to salt her own soup.” Other works explored aspects of the body and childbirth including a video of a woman squeezing breast milk at the camera.

The last day of our visit we met with Taus Makhacheva, whose work (including The Way of An Object, which was featured in the Triennial) draws inspiration from her native Dagestan. I was particularly delighted to hear her speak about the work of her “colleague and alter ego Super Taus,” who wears traditional clothing and lives in the mountains with her family. In one performance Super Taus carried a giant sculpture on her back through the galleries of Centre Pompidou, stunning passersby. In another, seemingly impossible act, she walked from Dagestan to Moscow carrying a monument. And in yet another she spent nine minutes pushing a giant boulder to clear the road, all captured in a dashcam video circulated on WhatsApp in hopes that it would go viral—heroic indeed!

These diverse works by women artists and collectives—whether drawn, sewn, thrown, or pushed—help to give voice to voiceless citizens, make visible invisible labor practices, and heroicize unsung heroes. The varied perspectives, strategies, and forms of their works offer new insights (and in some cases, much-welcome levity) about many of the most pressing social and political issues facing Russia today.

Reflection by Roxana Marcoci

In March 2017, the C-MAP Central and Eastern European group traveled to Moscow to attend the opening of the first Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art organized by the art museum Garage with works from across Russia’s eleven time zones. The exhibition included 68 artists and collectives and was organized by a six-person curatorial team around seven vectors: “Master Figure,” “Art in Action,” “Fidelity to Place,” “Personal Mythologies,” “Common Language,” “Local Histories of Art,” and “Mythologies.” The exhibition maps Russia today as a place grounded in multiple heritages (Russia comprises two hundred nationalities)—from Siberia to Chechnya—construing a prismatic montage of the different cultures from within its borders. One of the thorny issues surrounding the Triennial was the inclusion of Crimea —the Ukrainian territory that was annexed by Russia in 2014. The curatorial decision was to address the artistic life in the region but also to critically tackle its political underpinnings through a series of actions: a performance by Simferopol-based Free Dance Lab group; a discussion about Crimean artists working in Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia; and a presentation of Chto Delat’s Safe Haven (2016), a film about Crimean filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who is currently imprisoned in Russia for protesting the annexation.

2017 marks the centennial anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and although exhibitions celebrating the event abound across museums from New York to Chicago, London, Paris, and Venice, no institution in Moscow seems to mention this political milestone, which buttressed the rise of Russia’s first artistic avant-garde—as if the word “revolution” in itself could stir unwanted political discontent. The Garage Triennial may be the exception. A cross-generational exhibition, it includes works that have been made since 2012, the year of the last Russian presidential elections, which brought Vladimir Putin once again to the helm of the Russian Federation. In particular, the section “Art in Action” features urgent, politically charged work by fringe feminist collectives and activists such as Shvemy sewing cooperative, Victoria Lomasko, Urbanfeminism, and Nadenka creative association, who address issues including domestic violence (recently decriminalized in Russia) and the repression of LGBTQ rights (public displays of homosexuality are illegal), as well as sweatshop labor.

The section “Fidelity to Place,” which focused on associating sociopolitical themes with the landscape and broader environment, was particularly well curated. It included various works from Taus Makhacheva’s marionettes, with their emphasis on the traditional, the ethnic, and the modern; to Aslan Gaisumov’s display of recovered house numbers from his partially destroyed hometown of Grozny; to Vladimir Seleznyov’s Metropolis. Nizhny Tagil, an immersive installation filled with empty milk cartons, sardine cans, shoeboxes, and other discarded items that the artist had gathered from his Ural hometown.

Additionally, Garage’s Rem Koolhaas–designed facade was topped with an Ugo Rondinone rainbow sign. As part of the museum’s inclusivity program, children from across the country were invited to collaborate, contributing some 1500 pictures of their own rainbows, which were hung on a wall in front of the museum’s entrance.

With the idea of furthering international exchange, Garage Museum awarded travel grants to ten international curators—Riksa Afiaty (Indonesia), Çelenk Bafra (Turkey), Lizaveta German (Ukraine), Jarrett Gregory (United States), Albert Heta (Kosovo), Li Qi (China), Joanna Sokołowska (Poland), Polly Staple (Great Britain), Chen Tamir (Israel), and Diana Ukhina (Kyrgyzstan)—who were able to visit and reflect on the exhibition.

Reflection by  Ana Janevski

After two rich days in Moscow visiting many museums, seeing historical and contemporary shows, and engaging in stimulating conversations with artists, curators, and peers, we attended the opening of the first edition of the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art on Wednesday evening, May 9. The opening was very festive, gathering most of the artists presenting works, Moscow’s principal art figures, and several of the ten international curators who had been awarded travel grants, offered by Garage, to visit the exhibition.

What we learned about the Triennial before attending was that it included sixty artists from across the country selected by six members of the Garage curatorial team. The Triennial was commissioned and conceived by Kate Fowle, chief curator of Garage. Overseen by Fowle, Katya Inozemtseva, Snejana Krasteva, Andrey Misiano, Ilmira Bolotyan, Sasha Obukhova, and Tanya Volkova traveled throughout the country, visiting “forty cities and towns, crossing eleven times zones, in climates that range from the subtropical to the subarctic.” Later I learned that there are nearly two hundred nationalities and one hundred distinct languages spoken in Russia.

The two floors of the overall space were broken down by individual curators into seven “vectors,” or thematic groupings, including “Master Figure,” “Personal Mythologies,” “Street Morphology,” “Common Language,” “Fidelity to Place,” “Art in Action,” and “Local Histories of Art.”

Although an opening is not usually an ideal moment to thoroughly view an exhibition, I had a chance to join Snejana Krasteva’s tour, which she gave together with Maria Lind, director of Tensta konsthall in Stockholm, and Zdenka Badovinac, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I joined them on the first floor, in “Master Figure,” where Krasteva was talking about Andrei Monastirsky, one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism. Monastirsky was presenting four new videos in a series entitled Four Walks (2017). All walks started in the same place, which was significant to the history of Moscow Conceptualism, but each one ended at a different Moscow landmark. The other artists represented in this vector were Pavel Aksenov, Dmitry Bulatov, Ilgizar Khasanov, Anatoly Osmolovsky, and Dmitri Prigov. Each one of these artists, in his own specific way, has had an impact on the younger generation of artists across the huge territory of Russia. We asked Krasteva why there were not any women artists represented in “Master Figure.” She said the curators were aware of the strong presence of male artists in this section, but that there were no equally influential women artists of this same generation. While this explanation left me and my tour companions a bit perplexed, the next vector, entitled “Art in Action,” presented a very different situation, with a dominating number of female artists, whose work seemed to reference other “master” figures.

The path of the overall exhibition was pretty fluid, with open space, but some of the vectors were more delineated—as was the case with “Art in Action,” which occupied an entire gallery. The evening before, together with my colleague Laura Hoptman, a curator from the Department of Painting, and Viktor Misiano, a well-known Russian curator, we had talked about the important and controversial performances in the nineties by Alexander Brener, Oleg Kulik, and Avdei Ter-Oganian. We ended our conversation by discussing the generation of artists who have followed in their footsteps. “Art in Action” seemed to start exactly where our discussion had ended, by bringing together collectives and artists whose works focus mainly on critiques of social and political issues, and intend art as a catalyst of social change. They often consider themselves more activists than artists, practicing social work, journalism, or political activism, as is the case with Artem Loskutov, the organizer of the annual happening “Monstration,” or Katrin Nenasheva, whose public actions bring attention to the system of “corrective” psychiatry. The artistic collectives from the beginning of this decade, such as Voina, Pussy Riot, and Chto Delat, had a very strong influence on these younger artists, some of whom attended Chto Delat’s School for Engaged Art in St. Petersburg. Special attention was given to feminist issues, including domestic violence and emancipation from patriarchal society and institutions, through the works of collectives such as Shvemy sewing cooperative, a clothing manufacturing cooperative and collective who performed 12-Hour Workday, in which they re-created a factory workday at the opening; Nadenka creative association, who presented embroidered everyday objects and clothing with slogans that address the position of women in Russian society; and Urbanfeminism, who organized, among many other initiatives, self-defense classes for women and also published zines that were distributed in exchange for donations to a center for victims of sexual assault and shown in the gallery.

A few of the other artists represented in this gallery also had very personal and specific ways of dealing with the country’s salient political issues: Victoria Lomasko’s drawings refer to the prerevolutionary tradition of visual reportage. In Chronicles of Resistance (2011–12), she documents the Moscow demonstration from 2012 with direct quotes from participants. Alexey Iorsh’s project Art Activism in Comics (2012–ongoing) champions comics as a tool of activism. Anastasia Potemkina’s Bruise (2014) turn traces of physical violence into aesthetic images using the traditional medium of watercolor, while Alisa Yoffe’s large-format works in black and white present images with revolutionary potential.

The day after the opening, when we returned to the Triennial, we had a tour with another of its curators Andrei Misiano. It was interesting to follow the path of a different curator and to get his perspective on the overall exhibition. I went back to “Art in Action” to confirm that the challenging task of presenting this kind of work, mainly through its documentation, has been well resolved. The display presented a variety of media and was testament to a very vital and engaged artistic scene, one that is responsive in many different ways to current local and international social and political issues.

Reflection by  David Platzker

Myths and religion are the building blocks of art and art history. Artists, artisans, commissioners, collectors, historians, and curators have long reveled in portraying, possessing, and presenting stories of biblical, political, historic, personal, and otherwise divine sagas.

In this very traditional sense, the purest roles of art are that of storytelling, chronicling, interpreting, and messaging narrated moments—as slices of a feed if you will—to audiences as facts, morals, or parables. In eras long before photography was the primary tool of disseminating truths to a public audience, where literacy of images was often greater than that of written language, pictures—chiefly paintings—conveyed the majesty of ideals, since seeing encouraged believing.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, in the post-photography, post-video, post-internet, post-fact world, the art of telling stories has evolved to suit our times. Belief has become restructured by a cynicism that what we see in any medium—whether static imagery, video, aural, or textual—and is strained by an erosion of confidence that what is being conveyed is an objective-based reality. The power of a story solidified as a still image in any medium is tempered too by the locus of the delivery system by which one experiences a captured moment. Here, context drives experience, with perceptions shifting based on where and how an image is presented as much as on what the image is of. The question herein is whether the presentation in the context of a museum or a reputable newspaper connotes a definitional environment—an authentic place of faithful engagement, one that is greater in value—as a substrate for understanding that is the same, or as effective, as if it were presented on the screen of a cell phone without broader contextual surroundings.

Contemporarily tinkering with authenticity and with the crafting of new personal mythologies is the medium for artists Taus Makhacheva (b. 1983) and Evgeny Antufiev (b. 1986), who were featured in the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art and also made individual presentations to our C-MAP group on March 10, 2017. Rephrasing history and fashioning unique fictional narratives are the subjective materials of both artists, who take divergent, often intentionally humorous approaches to constructing chronicles that teeter between personal and colloquially regional experiences. Makhacheva, who is based in both her native city of Makhachkala, Dagestan, and Moscow, spoke to us about her work and alter ego—a character named Super Taus, who is a nondescript, ethnically clothed woman with the superpower of great physical strength tempered by utmost modesty. Deployed by Makhacheva, Super Taus appears in video works the artist has shared with the public though social media, confusing the underlying interpretation of the works as factual documentation of real feats of strength, as humor, and/or as a product of an artistic process. Equally challenging is whether such differentiations are even necessarily good or an indispensable prerequisite to an appreciation of the endeavor. It can be viewed here.

Falling short of starting his own religion, Antufiev discussed how his sculptures and installations reflect a desire on his part to craft objects that can be read as depicting alleged deities and the their accoutrements in a way that feels ancient formally and materially—conceivably as freshly unearthed artifacts rather than as contemporary works of art. As Antufiev spoke of his activities, it was clear that he has an inherent, contagious sense of humor, which left some of us wishing for more.

In Makhacheva’s and Antufiev’s presentations, we heard from artists who recognize that deploying regionalism and unique cultural identities, and parlaying the ethos or mystique of a nondominant culture within the space—such as a museum in Moscow or a cell-phone screen—enhance a deliberate ideal of separation from cultural dominance toward a fuzzy sense of romanticism of “the other.” This appeal is, in fact, a subversive return to a genuine simplicity predicated on the removal of the layered necessity to understand artworks as composites of the history that backs their places in an expansive, logical march of progression, wherein one form of art owes its existence—or interpretation—to prior works, and how they have become contextualized in word and presentation by their interpreters, such as historians, critics, curators, and educators, to the public.

Reflection by Jon Hendricks

Beautiful Moscow! I was so happy to return and to be embraced by its extraordinary art and architecture, and especially by its people. We have made many friends on our two trips to the city, and it is really unfair to single out just a few to write about. In 2015, we saw Sasha Pirogova’s work in Berlin at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, and I had the very special treat of sitting with her during a luncheon in the garden. She is an absolutely brilliant artist and thinker. This March she presented her work—a large-scale projection of choreographed waiting, anticipation, the not-yet-seen, the unknown—in the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art. Deceptively simple, and even seemingly trivial, this work is a profound metaphor for the future: What will it be? Who will be a part of it? Who will be excluded? It is about the inevitable . . .

Pirogova also gave our group a private presentation of her work the day following the opening of the Triennial, showing us several video works, and talking about her concepts and approaches to her practice. This year she will be one of the representatives of Russia in the Venice Biennale and so is in the process of preparing a new work, which we all are eager to see and experience. Pirogova is one of a small group of the new generation of artists around the world who has the ability to perceive the direction of our time and to open our eyes to it.

Another artist our group met in 2015 in Moscow, and whose work I have been very impressed with, is Alisa Yoffe. She was represented in the Triennial by a stunning wall of brutal drawings—stark and ominous in their direct confrontation with viewers. They have anger and, at the same time, anxiety, as well as convey Yoffe’s concerns about the world around her—temporal, fleeting, meaningless, seeking. We were very fortunate that she and three of her friends, Veronika Aktanova, David Ter-Oganyan, and Phillip Hulamhanov, could join a few of our group in the rooftop lounge of our hotel, following the opening of the Triennial, to talk and drink some delicious vodka. I think that this informal, spur-of-the-moment gathering was an important interaction with these young Russian artists—giving us unscripted insight into their work and thinking—something that I hope will happen more frequently in the future.

I also want to say how important I found our meeting with George Kiesewalter. He gave us a brief presentation of his work as part of Collective Actions group and also of his amazing photographic documentation of the Moscow avant-garde. I so hope that we can meet with him again in Moscow, and spend an afternoon talking and looking at his work. I think that this will be essential to our deeper understanding of this very vibrant and significant period in Russian art.

Of course, there is so much more to talk about. There was the fantastic exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery, The Thaw. At the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the very stimulating exhibition Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–1968, curated by Peter Weibel, places Russian art in the context of other European art of this time—and we were fortunate to have Weibel talk with some of us about the works as we looked at them. And yes, I did like the NAÏVE . . . NO exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and the Sergei Eisenstein exhibition at the Multimedia Art Museum.

Reflection by Erik Patton

Midway through the trip, after a visit to the Foundation of Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantine Sorokin, the group found its way to the soon-to-be V-A-C Foundation’s new Moscow site, GES-2, a former power station (built in 1907) that is being re-envisioned as a major site for contemporary art and culture. The Renzo Piano Building Workshop has been commissioned to revive and redesign the GES-2 main building and the surrounding area on the banks of the Moskva River. At the center of the newly imagined site is the institution’s commitment to performance (a large performance and theater-like space will take up a sizable footprint), which V-A-C has prioritized in recent years as made evident in its V-A-C Live programming with Whitechapel Gallery in London.

In fact, Moscow-based artist Evgeny Antufiev, with whom we met later on for a group-on-one studio visit (Antufiev’s work is also included in the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art), performed as a special guest at CABARET KULTURA with V-A-C Live (in September 2016 at Whitechapel), a series of experimental events inspired by Russian early twentieth-century avant-garde theater that took place in Russian artist Sergey Sapozhnikov’s site-specific stage set. For his performance, Antufiev created an absurdist and humorous lottery game featuring his objects-as-gifts in a playfully dark performance Dead Nation: Bingo Version.

Antufiev’s work in the Garage’s Triennial continued his interest in active mythmaking, the absurd, and his commitment to collecting and studying materials on Russian history and culture, including a monumental wooden sculpture in the tradition of the Scythians or the Etruscans. Other reliquaries on view referenced his personal history and family lineage (his grandmother’s teeth had found their way into his work).

At and around Garage MCA by Michelle Elligott

Reflection by Juliet Kinchin

Around the world there has been a rash of exhibitions and publications responding in some way to the centennial of the Russian Revolution, including MoMA’s own A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde, which gave us all the chance to wallow in the riches of the Museum’s Russian avant-garde works from the years 1912 to 1935 while in the process of planning and discussing our Moscow trip. Yet evidence of a comparable Russian interest in this centenary was conspicuous by its absence from our Moscow itinerary. A couple of our Russian colleagues suggested that in the current political climate, the authorities have been reluctant to draw attention to a time of seismic revolution and a violent overthrow of the status quo. Instead there seemed to be a citywide focus on a less traumatic period of technological modernization and cultural cross-fertilization—the years of the “Thaw” after Stalin’s death in 1953 and before the “Stagnation” of the 1970s. The largest and most ambitious of these exhibitions was The Thaw at the New Tretyakov Gallery, which presented a nuanced view of the period’s achievements and conflicts, addressing the shadow cast by hidden histories of wartime suffering and Stalinist internment camps, as well as the triumphalist rhetoric of land reclamation, space exploration, and technological progress. The exhibition was organized like an urban plan, the thematic sections’ skillfully integrated displays—of paintings, sculpture, prints, photography, and film, with architectural models, samples of industrial design, household objects, and popular magazines—radiating out from an evocation of Mayakovsky Square. There was a wealth of mesmerizing design material: photographs of Kalinin Avenue under construction in the 1960s; an experimental electronic-music studio; abstract printed textiles; a 1967 “Saturn” vacuum cleaner; a scary-looking 1965 model of a mobile nuclear power plant; Hula Hoop, painted in 1968 by D. I. Blokhintsev, head of the Institute for Nuclear Research and world authority on quantum mechanics; and the intriguing discovery that a woman, Galina Balashova (b. 1931), designed the interiors of the Soyuz space capsule in 1964.

An exhibition on the design of everyday life, Moscow Thaw: 1953–1968 at the Museum of Moscow was less coherent in both concept and installation, an impression not helped by the minimal, Russian-only labeling. It was interesting, nevertheless, to see materials from little-known archives and collections being documented and brought together in a public display for the first time. At the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, curators chose to lead off from Ossip Zadkine’s sculpture The Destroyed City in their wide-ranging survey of fine-art trends in Eastern and Western Europe after the war, entitled Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–68. Art from the Soviet Union was combined with that of seventeen other European countries in a series of telling juxtapositions, such as Hungarian Béla Kondor’s Phenomenon and Constant’s New Babylon (1967), challenging the conventional binary narrative of West = Abstract Expressionism versus East = Socialist Realism. Alongside familiar paintings were many I had never seen before, including Picasso’s Massacre in Korea (1951) and two Leipzig artists’ responses to the Hungarian Revolution: The Dead Dove (1956) by Harald Metzkes, and White Terror in Hungary (1957) by Werner Tübke.

An exhibition of photographs from the 1980s by Igor Mukhin was the Multimedia Art Museum’s contribution to Fashion and Style in Photography 2017, part of the 10th Moscow International Biennale. Compared to Moscow’s Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, this biennale did not seem to have a high profile. It was interesting to see Mukhin’s photographs of crumbling Soviet sculptures, part of his Monuments series (1988), after visiting Muzeon, the park of similarly uprooted and toppled sculptures next to the New Tretyakov Gallery. Many of the images were reproduced as attention-grabbing floor-to-ceiling wallpapers rather than as vintage prints. Some of the music-based alternative culture Mukhin captured in the 1980s I had encountered last year in the excellent Notes from the Underground: Art and Alternative Music in Eastern Europe 1968–1994, curated by Daniel Muzyczuk and David Crowley at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Also, at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, there was an exhibition that took a deeper dive into the films, drawings, designs, and photographs of Sergei Eisenshtein. Eisenshtein’s film and visual ideas drawn from the time he spent in Mexico, and his 1931 drawing of Saint Veronica as the patron saint of photojournalism remain among my favorite memories of this trip.

Reflection by Maria Marchenkova

One of my favorite things about Moscow is its panoply of architectural styles—medieval churches, audacious Stalinist skyscrapers, and gaudy post-Soviet, postmodern developments, to name just a few—and the dramatic history they evoke. In Moscow the past seems especially strongly imprinted on the urban environment, because the country’s sharp breaks with its own history have repeatedly involved drastically, even violently, reshaping the landscape, with seemingly little regard for its value.

I was reminded of this during the C-MAP trip when I picked up an issue of the Moscow Times that contained an article about the city’s plans to demolish eight thousand local Khrushchevki, five-story apartment buildings named after Nikita Khrushchev, who initiated their construction on a vast scale in the 1950s in response to the country’s postwar housing shortage. Granted, these buildings have few defenders: they are not considered architectural gems and are generally in bad shape. But even structures that are esteemed by scholars and experts around the world, particularly those designed by the Soviet avant-garde, have generally not fared well. The Melnikov House (1927–29), designed by Konstantin Melnikov, might qualify as a rare success story, but even its long-awaited opening as a museum in 2014, after years of legal battles over ownership, was controversial, with architects and other experts protesting that proper renovation work hadn’t been done. Most historic avant-garde work has fared much worse. The iconic Shukhov Tower, by Vladimir Shukhov, for example, which was completed in 1922 and transmitted the first radio and television signals in the Soviet Union, has been mired in disputes about its conservation for years. Sadly, the official attitude toward the city’s rich modernist architecture seems to range from ambivalence to hostility.

There are, however, a number of individuals and organizations advocating for awareness and preservation of these historic treasures. One of them is Natalia Melikova, who founded The Constructivist Project, a website that contains invaluable research, documentation, maps, and news, in 2010. Having recently discovered this resource, I was delighted when Melikova agreed to join the C-MAP group on an unofficial architecture tour. On our last day in the city, we set out to look at some early twentieth-century avant-garde buildings. The first stop was a bit of an outlier: Le Corbusier’s Centrosoyuz headquarters (1928–36). Although designed by an architect from outside the USSR, for our group, this building, the only one by the modernist master in Russia, was a must-see. We also visited the Zuev Workers’ Club (1927–29), designed by Ilia Alexandrovich Golosov. One of many such projects executed by the Bolsheviks to provide spaces where workers could be entertained and educated in line with socialist values, the club now houses a theater; its exterior has remained largely intact even as its interior has sadly been altered.

And we were fortunate enough to be able to get inside what is perhaps the most famous surviving example of Soviet avant-garde architecture: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis’s Narkomfin building (1928–30). Commissioned to house employees of the finance ministry, Narkomfin was originally conceived as a four-building complex where private quarters would be mixed with shared amenities, including a library, fitness center, laundry, and nursery, thereby facilitating a new communal mode of living. Although it was never completed as planned, it is nevertheless exemplary of a brief period when architects of the young Soviet Union were deeply engaged in a radical experiment in housing and had some official support. As the well-known story goes, that period quickly came to a close, as the state, under Stalin’s leadership, clamped down on the avant-garde. For a building that has been extensively studied and continues to be admired as an incredible expression of the Constructivists’ vision, Narkomfin is in a shocking state of disrepair. As our group wandered the halls of the six-story apartment block and visited several units, the beauty of the entire scheme and of the double-height apartments was still evident despite the decades of neglect. It was a privilege to see this historic site, whose future is still uncertain.

Reflection by Samantha Friedman

Many things struck me on my first trip to Moscow—also my first trip with C-MAP—from the imposing width of the streets to the incisively personal nature of much of the art we saw, at a time when international production can seem increasingly characterless. One of the things that left an especially strong impression on me, as we zipped from venue to venue, was something between architecture and the art itself, namely the presence of highly visible, anything-but-neutral exhibition design. Perhaps this should not have been surprising in Russia, a country whose avant-garde (which continues to haunt the contemporary in myriad ways) included a deep commitment to the design of all aspects of art and life. Seeing Gustav Klutsis’s radical designs for radio orators and propaganda kiosks at the New Tretyakov Gallery reminded me of this tradition in which the mechanics of display are as fully imagined as the message:

The lineage of this practice was visible just a few rooms away, where Kazimir Malevich’s Black Suprematic Square—Moscow’s art pilgrimage site par excellence—was guarded by a barrier of very particular design. At MoMA, we adopt bland metal stanchions (or, even better, sparkle tape on the floor) to avoid competing with the work itself. But here, the spirit of a Stenberg brothers’ spatial construction was incorporated into the institutional identity of the gallery:

From there it was on to Moscow’s Multimedia Art Museum, where an extensive exhibition on Sergei Eisenstein was the main attraction. The artist and filmmaker’s revolutionary theories of montage were expressed not only within the film excerpts on display, but also in the exhibition design. With a dizzying mix of large hanging projections, smaller wall-mounted screens, and framed drawings and photographs, the gallery space itself fulfilled Eisenstein’s call for “an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots.”

Something more roughhewn, if no less idiosyncratic, awaited at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art’s NAÏVE . . . NO exhibition, which sought out “historical and stylistic parallels between naïve art and primitivism of the 20th and 21st centuries.” Galleries were organized thematically—under such rubrics as “Childhood” or “Labor”—and each had a corresponding mise en scène, from painted white wood plinths for the former to tall grasses for the latter:

At the Museum of Moscow, the exhibition Moscow Thaw: 1953–1968 explored the material culture of that post-Stalin period. Fine art, as well as design objects, graphics, fashion, and cinema were arrayed across a white skeletal structure, vaguely reminiscent of the exhibition design for the Russian room of the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart:

Finally, while the overall exhibition design of the Garage Triennial was relatively straightforward, certain of its artists seemed to reference the tradition of avant-garde display structures in the works themselves. In their 1.5 x 1.5 SCHOOL, the Zip Group set up an apparatus containing multiple “schools”—“The School of Collective Actions and Debates,” for example, and “The School of Rave and Performance.” Each operated as a laboratory for visitor participation—whether to converse, to draw, to exercise, or to nap—and all were encompassed within an overarching, crudely Constructivist architecture. Welcoming and exuberant, providing both a place of culture and a place of rest, this work harnessed the best of the spirit of revolutionary Russian exhibition design.

Reflection by Paulina Pobocha

The New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow houses an extraordinary collection of Russian art, with an especially strong selection of work from the early twentieth century. Its holdings include terrific examples of work by the greats: Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Alexei Jawlensky, Vasily Kandinsky, Gustav Klutsis, Mikhail Larionov, Lyubov Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin, and many others. Malevich’s Black Suprematic Square (1915) casually hangs in a gallery sparsely populated with visitors but richly contextualized by other paintings and a selection of sculptures by the artist, made both before and after this iconic work of the Russian avant-garde. The galleries that lead up to Black Suprematic Square and those that follow insist, by virtue of the collection, on the local (national) history against which it should be read. The relationship between Malevich’s radically reductive abstractions and Russia’s rich tradition of folk art and religious (Byzantine) painting becomes paramount to an understanding of the latter and its broader milieu. In this context the artist’s stated desire for “a renovation of life through artistic form” seems less utopian and almost nearly attainable. Though we all know it didn’t turn out that way, the Tretyakov can make the case for what could have been in a way impossible for any Western museum. It is also uniquely equipped to show what followed: decades of Socialist Realist genre paintings, heavy with symbolism and propaganda. Though not uninteresting, they extinguished the promise of the Revolution with every committed comrade depicted. After seeing rooms of paintings and sculptures of mothers, farmers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and even astronauts meticulously and idealistically rendered as though out of time—in staunch defiance of reality, for all their realism—the need for Gorbachev’s twin policies of glasnost and perestroika felt almost as urgent as they must have been. They resound across the art produced in the 1980s, vibrantly on display in newly installed galleries devoted to Sots Art, where work by Erik Bulatov and Ilya Kabakov joins that by Yuri Albert, Ivan Chuykov, Nest (Gndezdo) Group, Boris Orlov, Leonid Sokov, and others to reintroduce a desperately needed critical perspective and an as-urgent dose of humor. Above all, and in contrast to that which had immediately come before, it felt unequivocally of its time. Our aim at MoMA is to expand the story of modernism that we are able to tell. To do so meaningfully depends on a deep knowledge of art historical contexts at far remove from our own. The Tretyakov presents precisely this—from its holdings emerges a rhythmic and episodic narrative that tells a story of the twentieth century, narrow in geographic focus but rich in texture, nuance, and detail, critical to any serious understanding, let alone future research.

Reflection by David Senior

Since I had never been to Moscow before, everything was of interest to me as we took in the city, its layout, and the architecture while being toured around the city center. Often, we had extra time to take it in as we sat in Moscow’s traffic.

When we arrived at the New Tretyakov Gallery, I sprinted past most of the special exhibits on my way to the Russian paintings, sculpture, and prints from the historical avant-garde, which make upthe core of the permanent collection. It was especially thrilling, of course, to land in front of Kazimir Malevich’s very cracked Black Suprematic Square (1915). It was quiet in the galleries and I lingered for a while, going back to the works that were most surprising and making note of the names of artists I didn’t recognize. A few smaller galleries held framed prints, collages, and examples of book cover designs. These galleries led to a reconstruction of an interior of a workers’ club, which was originally designed in 1925 by Aleksandr Rodchenko for the Soviet pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The clubroom features a long reading table, newspaper racks, and a curious photo-viewer with a lever that when cranked allows one to scroll through photographs affixed to a cylinder. It’s an exciting room to stumble upon—and to see again. I have a vague memory of its re-creation at a Rodchenko show at MoMA in 1998.

My eagerness to linger in the permanent collection caused me a bit of dismay later, when I eventually made it into the temporary exhibitions, which included The Thaw, a survey of art, design, and material culture of the postwar Soviet period, and also a large, chronological survey of Soviet Nonconformist art from the 1960s to the 1990s. Both of these shows demanded more time. The Thaw was especially of interest in its positioning of visual-art experiments with artifacts and other visual evidence of advances in Soviet science, technology, and industrial design in the 1950s and 1960s. In The Thaw, the kinetic or Op art experiments by Russian artists of the 1960s associated with the Movement Group, like Lev Nussberg, Rimma Zanevskaya, and Francisco Infante-Arana, seemed to be inevitable partners in terms of their design and materiality to the new ways of visualizing space, particles, and sound associated with the technological advances in cosmic and atomic research. At the same time, fresh from viewing the legion of Constructivist forms from the permanent collection, it was hard not to also project onto these kinetic experiments the lineage of applied abstraction and to affirm them as a kind of Neo-Constructivist practice. The last layer from the Treytakov, in regards to these particular artists, was their presence in the beginning of the display of Nonconformist art. In this narrative, the work of these Movement Group artists was presented as reflecting one of several originating tendencies in the timeline of the so-called Nonconformist practices in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere.

Having no real expertise in these particular art historical matters, but eager to know more, I was pleased to run into more works by Nussberg, Zanevskaya, and Infante-Arana, and the work of another Movement Group participant Vyacheslav Koleichuk, at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, which was our next visit. These works were in Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–1968, a traveling exhibition organized by Eckhart Gillen, Peter Weibel, and Danila Bulatov, which had just opened at the museum. At the Pushkin Museum, the work of these artists was featured in a constellation of postwar art from East and Western Europe. One aspect of this broad curatorial assemblage of European art from the 1950s and 1960s was to put the kinetic and optical experiments of the Moscow scene alongside works by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack of the Zero Group; Julio le Parc and François Morellet of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV); and Yugoslavian designer/artist Ivan Picelj. These international groupings suggested a more expansive kinetic and Op art map than is usually presented.

In retrospect it was an interesting encounter with a condition of exhibition-making, of how works can be used to push a curatorial narrative. In each case, the Movement Group works were used to promote a different set of curatorial ideas. The works by Nussberg, Zanevskaya, Infante-Arana, and Koleichuk were characteristic of a Soviet postwar imaginary, driven by cultural and political promotions of new technologies in communication, space exploration, and atomic science. As examples of Nonconformist art, they challenged former modes of artistic expression and opening up new spaces for artists to occupy in the face of an entrenched social and political reality. And in the context of a new postwar Europe, they were a part of a broad trend of experimenting with sense art and how perception can be challenged through the design and production of light images and sound environments. All of these ideas might be true, and either way, I was more than happy to experience these works in this new setting and to learn about these artists and this scene in Moscow that I hadn’t known about before.

More photos from the trip:

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Olga Chernysehva is a mid-career artist based in Moscow who works across media. Born in the Soviet Union yet living in post-Soviet Russia today, she is part of a generation marked by transition. Through her patient but in no way passive observation of her surroundings, Chernysheva documents the byproducts of communism still visibly entrenched in Russia’s volatile and fragile socio-political ecosystem. In this interview, she describes how she navigates among her films, photographs, drawings, and paintings. Chernysheva discusses her training at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, which was and still is the largest and most important film school in Russia, as well as her connection to the historical Russian avant-garde.

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Tomislav Gotovac—the influential avant-garde filmmaker, conceptual artist, and anarchist leader of Croatian performance art—occupies an authorial position within the alternative New Art Practice of the late 1960s in the former Yugoslavia.

After studying film directing at the Academy of Theater, Film, Radio, and Television in Belgrade, Gotovac made his first experimental films, inaugurating the golden age of Yugoslavian underground cinema with the trilogy Blue Rider (Godard Art), Circle (Jutkevic Count), and Straight Line (Stevens Duke) from 1964. Often compared to Structuralists such as Peter Kubelka, Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton, Gotovac aimed to free viewers from automated perception. He envisioned a synthesis between film and real life, as manifested in his famous statement, “When I open my eyes in the morning, I see a film.” When I first met Gotovac in 2000 on the occasion of the exhibition Here Tomorrow that I was curating in Zagreb, he referred to politics as being dead. “The only thing left,” he pointed out, “is aesthetics.” He spoke of his passion for Soviet October films, Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, French New Wave cinema, and American film noir, as well as dark slapstick comedy and jazz.

Alongside his films, Gotovac was actively engaged with photography. Showing Elle (1962), a vintage photographic work that was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection, is a landmark of a new artistic language antipodal to official modernism. The work consists of six pictures documenting Gotovac’s first public performance in a public space. Executed in wintertime at the popular Sljeme Mountain, near Zagreb, Showing Elle is an early example of the artist performing partially naked in a local context. Gotovac used a 35-mm camera to stage and direct a filmic sequence. Through the simple act of posing and smiling in front of the camera, while showing the popular French fashion magazine to his friends, Gotovac opened up a set of critical questions about male-female relationships, the dynamics of desire, the tension between real and imaginary, and the antithesis between images of a distant consumer society and the everyday reality of a socialist world. Gotovac looked to art as a vehicle for change.

In subsequent actions, Gotovac provoked the socialist state by enacting apparently simple everyday tasks—as an artist begging, cleaning city squares, performing public haircutting and shavings. When he marched naked and kissed the asphalt in the center of Zagreb in his action Zagreb, I Love You!, in 1981, he at once confronted a state built on mass docility and asserted his difference amid hardline social conformity. His works of cross-cultural reference offer a perceptive view of the official politics of power, gender roles, and the paradoxes inherent in society’s constitutional structure.

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Under the leadership of Christophe Cherix, and accompanied by Jarosław Suchan from Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (PL), the group met with longtime colleagues and made numerous new acquaintances in Bucharest, Vilnius, Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Berlin. We visited museums, foundations, and contemporary art centers; looked at paintings, documents, and PowerPoint presentations; talked to artists, curators, and archivists over office desks and café tables; and experienced art exhibited, among other places, in the former museum of Soviet Revolution in Vilnius, in Ceauceşcu’s monumental palace in Bucharest, as well as in the basement of a block of flats—a vestige of the Communist era—in Belgrade. We were welcomed into museum storage spaces and people’s kitchens, and the inspiring encounters in each city left our minds racing, while our travel bags were got heavier and heavier with the books we were given by our hosts.

Here we share our impressions from some of the more than fifty meetings we held in the five cities. This experience has turned out to be invaluable for our ongoing C-MAP research in New York. As we look back at it now, we would like to know: Did we miss anything? As visitors to this region, we are aware of the limitations to our own knowledge and we invite your comments, and critique of our itinerary.

MM

May 24th: Bucharest

Day One in Bucharest: Visit to MNAC

By Roxana Marcoci

As soon as our plane landed on May 24 at Otopeni airport in Bucharest, we headed to Hotel Intercontinental, dropped off our luggage, and went straight to the Palace of Parliament, better known as “Casa Poporului” (House of the people). We learned that this is the largest building in Europe and the second largest in the world after the Pentagon. The edifice was designed during Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime, after the Romanian dictator returned from a visit to North Korea in the early 1970s. Today, the building functions as the seat of political and administrative power, and it also houses MNAC (The National Museum of Contemporary Art), which opened in 2001. Our first visit was scheduled with MNAC’s director, Mihai Oroveanu, and Chief Curator Ruxandra Balaci. Oroveanu, a photography historian who oversees the museum’s collections, took us on a walk through the architectural photography exhibition on view, featuring International-style buildings from the 1920s and ’30s in Bucharest, many of which have since been destroyed. We also visited the museum’s underbelly, its hidden, residual storage spaces, where we saw a trove of Socialist Realist paintings—all official portraits of Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena. At MNAC we met with two members of subREAL, a group founded in 1990 by Călin Dan, Iosif Király, and Dan Mihaltianu, whose conceptual works were being installed for a retrospective that was opening the following week. Later that evening, we had dinner with artist Dan Perjovschi, curator Alina Serban, and philosopher Erwin Kessler.

MNAC: National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest

SubREAL at MNAC

By Michelle Elligott

One of the highlights of the trip for me was meeting Iosif Király and Călin Dan of the group subREAL and visiting the preliminary installation of their exhibition at MNAC with them. It was great to see one of their iconic works, Draculaland, in person. But perhaps of even more interest was viewing their poster for Dataroom while listening to the artists describe it: a yearlong live/work project in which they inhabited a room whose walls and ceiling were covered with reproductions of artworks from Arta, the official art magazine in Romania, and where they staged events. Truly a living archive… (and nice to know that the Arta image archive now resides in MNAC’s documentation center).

Bucharest

By Jon Hendricks

I felt great excitement about going to Romania for the first time, with visions of Brancusi’s Endless Column in my mind and amazement that I would be visiting the source from which so much Dada sprang—Tristan Tzara, Arthur Segal, Marcel Janco and his brothers, like a bookend to Berlin for the fusion in Zurich. Excitement also that we would be meeting the great artists Ion Grigorescu and Geta Brătescu, both of whom deserve much greater recognition in the world. There were no disappointments in Bucharest. We were warmly welcomed by Mihai Oroveanu and Ruxandra Balaci at the National Museum of Contemporary Art. Mihai has encyclopedic knowledge of the Romanian avant-garde, and they both shared so much with us. At dinner, I had a chance to speak at length with Erwin Kessler, who also has a vast knowledge of the Romanian avant-garde. The food was delicious as well.

Bucharest Biennale Opening Performance by Klas Ericsson

By Paulina Pobocha

Soon after our lively dinner with Dan Perjovschi, Alina Serban, and Erwin Kessler in the restaurant of the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest, where the C-MAP group had checked in several hours previously, we made our way outside to view the Bucharest Biennale’s inaugural event, a work titled Com’on You Reds by Swedish artist Klas Ericsson. The sun had set, and it was just beginning to rain as we joined an already assembled group of onlookers in the plaza directly in front the hotel’s entrance. Slowly, the building seemed to set aflame. It was impressive. (In fact, in a highly coordinated effort, several dozen volunteers positioned on the hotel’s balconies lit red flares, beginning on the lower floors and working their way up, creating the illusion of fire.) I had learned during dinner that prior to 1989, the Intercontinental was the premier hotel in Bucharest (though it’s older now, I think it still is), attracting primarily foreign patrons. During the 1989 revolution, the hotel’s balconies offered privileged views of the protests happening in the immediate vicinity of University Square. Ericsson’s work thoughtfully engaged the history of the city and the building. It was an effective start to a Biennale staged, in part, in the city’s unused, dilapidated, or otherwise peripheral corners.

Bucharest Biennale 5 opening

By Roxana Marcoci

That same evening we attended the opening performance of the Bucharest Biennale, Tactics for the Here and Now. Organized by Ann Barlow, the biennial responded to the shifting conditions of economic culture and recent political revolutions through a series of new commissions by seventeen emerging artists, including Alexandre Singh, Wael Shawky, Haris Epaminonda, Aurélian Froment, and Marina Albu. The opening performance was by the Berlin-based Swedish artist Klas Ericsson, who set Hotel Intercontinental ablaze. Titled Com’on You Reds, the performance took us by surprise when one hundred volunteers began burning red flares from the balconies of the hotel in which we stayed. This hotel is a landmark of Bucharest. Situated in University Square, site of student protests, the hotel is the seat from which foreign journalists reported during the 1989 revolution.

At dinner

May 25th: Bucharest

Bucharest Biennale 5

By Roxana Marcoci

The next morning, we visited other venues of the biennial. A highlight was the House of Free Press, an edifice previously closed to the public. This structure is practically a copy of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, the largest university in Russia. Erected in the 1950s, it was the headquarters of state media, the printing press, and of the newspaper Scînteia, which emerged as the official voice of the Communist Party of Romania. Interestingly, the legacy of Communism was displayed alongside the city’s burgeoning capitalist spring: when we saw the building, the top of its facade was emblazoned with a Citibank banner. Another venue worth visiting was the Institute for Political Research, which opened ten years after the 1989 revolution and serves as one of the few platforms for debate and critical analysis of the political environment in Romania. Here we saw Marina Albu’s The Real People’s House, an environment that re-creates the living conditions during Ceauşescu’s power supply blackouts; and Janice Kerbel’s Remarkable, a series of faux agitprop posters inspired by nineteenth-century fairground posters.

Bucharest Biennale 5

By Jon Hendricks

The Bucharest Biennale is a raw and vital gathering of artists doing current and essential work. One really feels a sense of discovery, a sense of immediacy, and a need to better understand the work. Many of the installations are demanding and provoking. I was especially taken with the work of Marina Naprushkina from Belarus, who is challenging not only herself but the structure of her society.

MNAR (National Museum of Art of Romania) and Around

MNAR, Food, and Thought

By Jon Hendricks

While in Bucharest, we were treated to a tour of the National Museum of Art of Romania (MNAR), where we not only saw displays of their permanent collection of twentieth-century Romanian avant-garde art, but also were very privileged to look at works by Maxy, Janco, and Segal in their vaults. Curator Valentina Iancu was most helpful and informative. For lunch, we went to the small vendors behind the museum and had enormous, dripping sandwiches that were delicious.

Ion Grigorescu Studio Visit

By David Senior

The first formal studio visit of the trip did not take place in a studio and was not that formal. The entire MoMA group descended upon Ion Grigorescu’s apartment for a conversation with the artist. We talked of older works from the 1960s and the social setting of these works. He told of the necessity of developing his own films in secret and the degree of difficulty in making and showing work in Bucharest at that time. The discussion turned to Grigorescu’s current practice, and he passed around daily journals annotated with notes and drawings. We were short on time, and some of group left to meet with Geta Brătescu while a few of us stayed behind. We went downstairs to a cafe, and in this setting, Grigorescu spoke more about his journals and his interests in writing and psychoanalysis. He currently records his dreams. Some of these dream writings have been published in a Bucharest art magazine, but we talked of the possibility of a book project to assemble all of these materials in one place. He also discussed some his long-ago travels, such as the time he went to Paris and met Christian Boltanski and Jean Le Gac. It was a gorgeous afternoon as we finished our drinks in the outdoor cafe and finally said goodbye to Mr. Grigorescu.

Meeting Ion Grigorescu

By Paulina Pobocha

During our visit with Ion Grigorescu at his studio, he mentioned that the political situation in Romania was such that, until the 1990s, after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, his seminal 1978 film Dialogue with Ceauşescu had only been viewed by a handful of people. In fact, he made it in complete seclusion, playing both roles, operating the camera, and later developing the film in his studio. He stressed that everyone was a potential informant, and there were very few people including fellow artists, friends, and family that he could trust. The reception of an artwork is predicated on an audience. For many artists the prospect of reception, intertwined as it is with a desire to communicate, drives their practice. Given the oppressive censorship in Romania during the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, which virtually robbed Grigorescu of an audience, it is remarkable that this and his other films exist at all.

Ion Grigorescu

By Roxana Marcoci

While in Bucharest we made two memorable studio visits, one with Ion Grigorescu, an iconic figure of performance and Conceptual art. Increasingly acclaimed for his role in effectively cultivating resistance and underground art under Communist totalitarianism, Grigorescu’s work has recently been added to MoMA’s collection, filling an important gap in the history of media and performance art.

Geta Brătescu

By Roxana Marcoci

The other visit was with Geta Brătescu, who at age eighty-six works daily in her studio. During the two decades of Ceauşescu’s regime, Brătescu’s studio served multiple functions: as a space of interaction for artists working outside the official art scene (she did a number of film collaborations with Grigorescu), and as a site where she developed performative choreographies that took on political implications. Christophe Cherix conducted an interview with Geta about the influence of Chaplin on her work and the special role that the studio plays in her practice.

Geta Brătescu Studio Visit

By Paulina Pobocha

Our group split into two, and five of us took the van to a residential area of Bucharest to visit 86-year-old artist Geta Brătescu. We were warmly greeted by the artist and her gallerist Marian Ivan in a well-lit and very much in-use studio. During the course of our visit, we saw many works still in her collection, among them a series of intricate sewing-machine drawings titled Medea’s Hypostasis and Pafnutie’s Box, and a collection of performative objects related to her 1978 film The Studio. I was as much impressed by her personality as by her art. Almost forty years after her first films, she remains equal parts exuberant and irreverent. There has been a recent surge in interest surrounding Brătescu’s practice. It is well deserved.

May 26th: Vilnius

National Gallery of Art

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

The National Gallery of Art in Vilnius was designed in 1966 and erected in 1980 as the Museum of the Revolution of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was part of USSR until its dissolution in 1991. What used to be a monument to constructed history and, ultimately, oppressive ideology now houses twentieth-century art. The story was told to us by Lolita Jablonskienė, the gallery’s chief curator, as early afternoon sun from over the nearby Vilnia River entered the modernist building through its massive windows. We were amazed by (and also slightly jealous of) the building’s 2009 additions: two freestanding, wall-like, shiny, black structures of almost sculptural quality that house staff offices.

Lolita gave us a fascinating tour of the collection, which has been gathered over the past century and reflects Vilnius’s complex history. (The city belonged to Poland before World War II and is an important part of the history of Polish avant-garde art.) She explained that the lack of more experimental artistic trends in the collection reflects the general lack of such trends in Lithuanian postwar art. Lolita also told us that the urge to build a national cultural identity for the relatively young democratic Lithuanian state has had repercussions on the local art market, which remains rather closed to foreign artistic production.

After this illuminating walkthrough we found ourselves in yet another seminar on Lithuanian art. Elona Lubytė gave us an extensive presentation of the exhibition Quiet Modernism in Lithuania 1962–1982, which she curated in 1997. She made the claim that in Lithuania, unlike in many other countries of the region, there was no clear division between official and unofficial artists (those supported by state institutions and those working underground). There were only official and unofficial art spaces, in which the same artists exhibited very different types of production. She showed us a set of beautifully crafted handmade Christmas cards that local artists used to send to each other in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, as a form of independent, very personal art practice. After the viewing, we were treated to more presentations. Dovilė Tumpytė gave an overview of an extremely ambitious archival project that the gallery is participating in, called Parallel Chronologies: An Archive of East European Exhibitions and organized by tranzit.hu, and Ieva Mazūraitė-Novickienė showed us books on photography recently published in Lithuania.

Before we left the National Gallery, we met with the artist Dainius Liškevičius and the curator Giedrius Gulbinas in the space of their show The Museum. And so, by the time we found ourselves once again on the monumental steps outside the museum, the sun was sinking behind the Old Town’s historic buildings on the other side of the river.

Old Town in Vilnius

Sunny Vilnius

By Paulina Pobocha

The Old Town of Vilnius is extraordinarily clean, composed of newly renovated buildings whose freshly painted facades are spotlit in the evening to maximum dramatic effect. We checked into our hotel on a warm and sunny Saturday when the Lithuanian Heritage Festival was in mid-swing, aurally evidenced by the folk music filling the square. After Bucharest, a very lived-in city, I wondered if I hadn’t just walked onto a film set. The effect was so pronounced and startling that I asked Virginija Januškevičiūtė, a curator from the Contemporary Art Center, about it. As it turns out, in 2009 Vilnius was selected as the European Capital of Culture, which spurred much restoration across the city and particularly in the historic district. Of course, most residents of Vilnius live outside the Old Town under comparatively normal lighting conditions.

May 27th: Vilnius

Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius

Mindaugas Navakas

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

One of the artworks we found most impressive in the National Gallery’s vast collection was a set of collages showing imaginary monuments inserted into Vilnius’s urban spaces. The collages were produced by Mindaugas Navakas between 1981 and 1985. We visited the artist the next day: he hosted us in a sculpture garden just outside of the city, in a place where the artistic community started setting up studios and open-air exhibition spaces in the 1980s. Navakas himself gained wide international recognition after representing Lithuania at the Venice Biennale in 1999, and although he mainly produces monumental stone sculptures, the artist shared with us his former fascination with industrially produced materials. It was a fascination he developed in the early 1990s, when these materials suddenly flooded the Lithuanian market, prompting him to produce a very different body of work. For his successful Frieze Project installation commissioned for London’s Frieze Art Fair in 2009, Navakas used windows that had just been removed from Vilnius’s Center for Contemporary Art during its renovation. We found some of those in his garden, mounted directly on the ground. They surrounded a medium-sized, sarcophagus-shaped piece executed in red granite and hollowed out in the middle, creating something similar to a mini shaded glasshouse for the sculpture. The artist presented the piece to us as his outdoor bathtub, and just as we started giggling at what we assumed was a joke, we noticed that the granite tub did indeed have a stopper…

Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center

By Gretchen Wagner

Through my work with the Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift at MoMA, I had heard much about the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center and looked forward to finally visiting in person. Having spearheaded the influential Anthology Film Archives and Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York, Mekas, a Lithuanian filmmaker, returned home to initiate yet another site for creative production and research. Fundamental to the Center’s mission is the desire to establish Vilnius as “avant-garde’s new capital” and to do this by exhibiting historical material, including Fluxus objects and documents acquired by the city, as well as presenting contemporary projects. Considering this ambitious call for a hub of radical activity, it was peculiar to find the Center located in a recently constructed high-rise office building. Perhaps this is a comically subversive gesture on the part of Mekas? The space opened to the public in 2007 with the exhibition The Avant-Garde: From Futurism to Fluxus. At the time of our visit, young local artists from the Ministry of Fluxus collective performed and discussed their installations. It was disappointing that we could not access works in the collection during our stay for reasons that were not altogether clear; however, perhaps the works will return to view soon and be made available to the public as the Center initially intended.

Meeting Vytautas Landsbergis

By Jarosław Suchan

It was an intriguing experience to sit face-to-face with the distinguished deputy of the European Parliament and a prominent conservative politician, while being aware that a few decades ago he was associated with Fluxus, one of the most radical (also politically) experiments in art. George Maciunas, the leader of Fluxus, exchanged correspondence with Landsbergis, and at the same time, he was writing letters to Khrushchev trying to convince him to make the USSR the center of the Fluxus movement. You can say: a typical story. Many contemporary American neocons used to be involved in the countercultural revolt of the 1960s. But this instance, I think, is more complex. This is not necessarily a case of political “conversion.” In the art of Central Europe, we can find quite a few examples proving that artistic radicalism went hand in hand with political conservatism (or a kind of pro-aristocracy stance), since they both contested the then status quo.

Darius Mikšys

By Barbara London

In the lounge of our Vilnius hotel, part of the group met with the soft-spoken Darius Mikšys. The artist talked about his practice, in which social networks take on new forms. For Mikšys, installations provide the opportunity to experiment, conceptualize, and reimagine processes of making, displaying, and engaging with art. Representing Lithuania at the Venice Biennale in 2011, Mikšys invited all Lithuanian artists who had received Lithuanian government grants to submit a work to his project, titled Behind the White Curtain. Visitors to the Lithuanian pavilion were able to access a database and select from these works, enabling them to create their own displays of Lithuanian art. This resulted in a continuously changing narrative of collective identity.

Meeting with Arturas Raila

By David Senior

Virginija Januškevičiūtė, the curator from the CAC, told me when we met the first night in Vilnius about a coming project that the center was doing with the artist Arturas Raila. Raila produced a video project, Under the Flag (2000), of a Lithuanian neo-Nazi group as they commented on videos of various street scenes that the artist had filmed during a residency in Lenz, Austria. The video had never been screened in Lithuania because of an agreement that Raila had with the subjects of the film. Virginija explained that the CAC was planning to do a reenactment of the film with actors as a way of getting around the issue of screening the original version in Lithuania. We met with Raila at the Academy of Fine Arts on our second day in Vilnius, and he screened Under the Flag for us, as well as another video piece, The Girl Is Innocent, about the traditional academic training and review process that still existed in Lithuanian art academies in the 1990s.

May 28th: Vilnius

Vilnius: The Ministry of Fluxus, Republic of Užupis

By Gretchen Wagner

George Maciunas envisioned the interpenetration of art and life as a core proposition of Fluxus, and in Vilnius we encountered examples of this put into practice, with some cases very specifically citing the legacy of the historical movement. Maciunas’s work to establish Flux Houses, cooperative living for artists in downtown New York during the 1960s and 1970s, finds resonance in developments currently taking place in Vilnius. The Ministry of Fluxus, opened in 2010 by the city’s mayor, Artūras Zuokas, housed studios and workshops with the aim of fostering community among local artists of all disciplines. The short-lived space has since closed; however, the Republic of Užupis, its more established counterpart, continues. Located in the city’s Old Town, the Republic was founded in 1997 when the district declared itself independent, with its own flag, currency, president, and constitution. The terms of the latter are nonsensical and contradictory, and mostly point toward total freedom in all aspects of life. Our tour of the district revealed Fluxus landmarks, including a footbridge dedicated to the movement and alleyways tagged with Maciunas’s spray-painted portrait. Maciunas’s efforts in New York sparked SoHo’s status as an artists’ enclave and eventually a gentrified commercial district. Will these same results come to pass in Vilnius?

Užupis

Constitution of Užupis

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

The 41 rights, which form this constitution, were officially announced on April Fool’s Day of 1997, and the citizens of the Republic annually celebrate April 1 as their Independence Day. These rights are now engraved on mirrors that are attached to a wall in one of the district streets, Paupio Street, where they can be read in eight languages. Here is the English version:

Constitution of Užupis

Everyone has the right to live by the River Vilnelė, while the River Vilnelė has the right to flow by everyone.

Everyone has the right to hot water, heating in winter and a tiled roof.

Everyone has the right to die, but it is not a duty.

Everyone has the right to make mistakes.

Everyone has the right to individuality.

Everyone has the right to love.

Everyone has the right to be not loved, but not necessarily.

Everyone has the right not to be distinguished and famous.

Everyone has the right to be idle.

Everyone has the right to love and take care of a cat.

Everyone has the right to look after a dog till one or the other dies.

A dog has the right to be a dog.

A cat is not obliged to love its master, but it must help him in difficult times.

Everyone has the right to sometimes be unaware of his duties.

Everyone has the right to be in doubt, but this is not a duty.

Everyone has the right to be happy.

Everyone has the right to be unhappy.

Everyone has the right to be silent.

Everyone has the right to have faith.

No one has the right to violence.

Everyone has the right to realize his negligibility and magnificence.

Everyone has the right to encroach upon eternity.

Everyone has the right to understand.

Everyone has the right to understand nothing.

Everyone has the right to be of various nationalities.

Everyone has the right to celebrate or not to celebrate his birthday.

Everyone shall remember his name.

Everyone may share what he possesses.

No-one can share what he does not possess.

Everyone has the right to have brothers, sisters and parents.

Everyone is capable of independence.

Everyone is responsible for his freedom.

Everyone has the right to cry.

Everyone has the right to be misunderstood.

No-one has the right to make another person guilty.

Everyone has the right to be personal.

Everyone has the right to have no rights.

Everyone has the right to not be afraid.

Do not defeat.

Do not fight back.

Do not surrender.

May 29th: Belgrade and Novi Sad

From Belgrade to Novi Sad: Van Ride with Miško

By David Senior

We assembled in the early morning to make our trip to Novi Sad, and we were joined in our van by curator, art historian, and writer Miško Šuvaković. I noticed that he was carrying a rather large bag but did not think too much about it at that early hour. As we departed from downtown Belgrade, we asked Miško some questions about the artists we would meet at the reception in Novi Sad and the historical lineage of neo-avant-garde groups and artists that had formed in the late 1960s and early ’70s in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and the neighboring city of Subotica. As he proceeded with the discussion, he would pull books out of his bag and send them around for us to look through during the road trip. As time passed, more and more books emerged from the bag until all of us had things to look at and piles accumulated. Astoundingly, all of these publications were books that Miško himself, our gracious guide sitting in the front of the van, had authored, edited, or contributed to in some form. We perused exhibition catalogues and monographs of Bogdanka and Dejan Poznanović, the OHO group, Group KOD, Atila Černik, as well as a selection of surveys of the historical avant-garde and mid-century New Tendencies artists and designers in the former Yugoslavia. The level of scholarly production was incredible, and the van ride had quickly turned into an intensive seminar.

Visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad

Novi Sad: Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina

By Paulina Pobocha

We left Belgrade very early Tuesday morning and headed by car to Novi Sad, accompanied by the gracious and incredibly knowledgeable Miško Šuvaković. (If you have an interest in learning more about avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art practice in Yugoslavia, I recommend consulting one of the many books Šuvaković has authored.) At the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Vladimir Kopicl, the museum’s director, himself an artist and poet, had invited many, primarily Conceptual artists active in the region during the 1970s to the museum for a conversation. It was a nicely orchestrated event that enabled us to view works in the collection, including photographs and documentary materials, while speaking to the people who made them. The museum in Vojvodina has a strong commitment to collecting and exhibiting Conceptual and performance-based art. They employ a curator who deals specifically and exclusively with this material and have begun an impressive project of digitizing the works in their collection as well as related archival matter, making it available to the general public online.

Novi Sad: Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina

By Michelle Elligott

During our visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, I was impressed to learn that they have a Department of Conceptual Art, with its own curator. Coming from a museum where the departments are divided by medium/discipline (Painting and Sculpture, Photography, Film, etc.), it was a nice change to think about grouping works by their aesthetic sensibility rather than medium. Furthermore, the department has done an admirable job of digitizing its complete assets.

Novi Sad: Ilija & Mangelos Foundation

By Michelle Elligott

Our visit to the Ilija & Mangelos Foundation was a surprise and delight. The foundation is headquartered in the apartment of Mangelos’s brother, and we were not sure what to expect. First, we were treated to an introduction to the foundation provided by Mangelos’s very knowledgeable niece, Ivana Basicević, who is currently completing her PhD on Mangelos and Marcel Broodthaers (which resonated with us due to MoMA’s extensive recent acquisitions of work by both of these artists). But the story literally came alive when Mangelos’s brother became animated, leapt to his feet, and began recounting stories about the two of them as young men. His subjects ranged from working in the fields to his brother studying art history. The residential backdrop was enlivened by artworks and a manifesto on the walls, and we sat enraptured as we inspected countless examples of handwritten letters, texts, diaries, painted notebooks and sketchbooks, and unique artist books, all displaying Mangelos’s distinctive cursive handwriting on ruled lines. The grand finale was when Ivana displayed the smallest of all of Mangelos’s legendary globes; this gilded example fit in the palm of her hand.

Novi Sad: Visit to kuda.org

By David Senior

A group of us took a car to a residential neighborhood in Novi Sad to meet with the members of kuda.org, a media and arts organization that is both an experimental Internet platform with international scope and an active participant in the local cultural scene. The office space houses a study center, a small library, and a meeting area where they stage events and talks by visiting scholars. The talks are streamed and archived on the kuda.org site. The site is also home to their digital journal and an extensive set of links to events in Novi Sad, Belgrade, and other international locations that the group is participating in or promoting. We were shown copies of the catalogues Political Practices of (post) Yugoslav Art and Art Always Has Its Consequences, to which kuda.org contributed, along with other groups like the Zagreb-based curatorial collective WHW (What, How and for Whom) and transit.hu. Among other things, the exhibitions that gave rise to these catalogues highlighted the practices of the Yugoslavian neo-avant-garde of the late 1960s and ’70s and collected extensive documentation of this generation of artists. These contemporary curatorial groups have done interesting work to rehabilitate these particular histories of an older generation of artists and filmmakers.

SKC in Belgrade

By Roxana Marcoci

In the 1970s, some of the most advanced, politically engaged exhibition spaces were the student centers that proliferated in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Novi Sad, which served as platforms for ideas that were largely informed by neo-Marxist critical theory. Although today they don’t serve the same purpose, they preserve important archives about those years. We made a stop at the Archives of the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade and reviewed some of their publications. Beuys was there in the 1970s, numerous exhibitions by the New Art Practice generation took place there, and the famous two-day feminist conference “Comradess woman: the women’s question; a new approach?” was hosted there, the first of its kind in a Communist country. Although heavily criticized by the official Yugoslavian women’s organizations “on the grounds that a feminist stance was superfluous in Communist society, which had already ‘overcome’ gender differences in the Revolution,” the event marked a turning point, since for the first time Yugoslavian feminists were able to publicly question the rule of patriarchy in socialist society.

SKC: Student Cultural Center in Belgrade

SKC in Belgrade

By Michelle Elligott

It felt like stepping into history when we assembled in the archive of the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, with a large photo mural of Joseph Beuys’s performance there in 1972 gracing the walls. We were treated to a presentation by Dragica Vukadinović, who is in charge of the documentation center and is herself a living archive, as she has been with the Center since its early days. She is undertaking the large-scale, painstaking process of digitizing the entire photo archive, an admirable ambition, which can be found here.

Belgrade: Visit to the Student Cultural Center (SKC)

By Jarosław Suchan

The history of this place proves that the reality of art in socialist countries can’t be described in black and white. It is much more complex that we used to think. It is true that the SKC was established due to pressure from student revolts, as an answer to their demands for a space for independent culture to thrive. But it may also be true that the state created the place to channel the students’ rebellion and to control “independent” culture. This was a place where one could go much further than in other spaces—but does this mean that everything was possible? How far one could go in criticizing the ruling political system? By saying this, I don’t want to diminish the importance of what was going on at SKC. Regardless of the fact that the freedom it offered was licensed, it was a place of authentic experiment: cultural, artistic, social. The list of events that took place there in the 1970s and ’80s is really impressive. However, I wonder if there were any events that were not realized for political reasons…

Meeting Raša Todosijević

By Jarosław Suchan

I liked his honesty, his reluctance to portray as heroic his own activity in the 1970s (although he is aware of its importance) and to mythologize the reality in which this activity took place. Today we observe a tendency to idealize the times of Tito’s socialism. The activity of SKC and radical artists like Raša Todosijević is to confirm the democratic character of Tito’s Yugoslavia, so different from the nationalism of the 1990s. Todosijević shows that the 1990s were horrible, but that doesn’t mean that the 1970s were OK.

Belgrade: Meeting Raša Todosijević

By Roxana Marcoci

In Belgrade we visited the studio of Raša Todosijević, a protagonist of the Belgrade group of Conceptual artists best known for the series of performances Was ist Kunst? (What is art?), which he held between 1976 and 1981 in various settings. In these, Todosijević touched, slapped, and smeared the face of his partner while whispering, shouting, screaming, pleading, begging, or simply demanding an answer to the question, “What is art?” A discourse on authoritarianism, the piece probes the nature of art itself, a duality that is prevalent throughout Todosijević’s work. Todosijević also talked about his controversial sculptural installations, performances, and pseudo-advertisements with which he denounced the dominant Serbian culture of exalted nationalism during the 1990s. In 1989, with the historic turn to post-Yugoslavian states, he began a series of installations titled God Loves the Serbs. In these works, he inverted symbols of totalitarian ideologies and religions to offer a political critique of the right-wing, ultranationalist daily culture that pervaded the region throughout the 1990s. He arranged ordinary restaurant tables to form the shape of swastikas, on which traditional Serbian dishes (beans, bread, and beer) were served, and mounted a giant red swastika on a wall with a text underneath, written in heavy black typeface, about a Serbian woman who curses God and Communism alike.

Meeting Branko Vučićević

By Jon Hendricks

In Belgrade, Gretchen Wagner and I had the honor of meeting with the legendary filmmaker, writer, and catalyst Branko Vučićević. Living in Belgrade in 1966, Vučićević was interested in Fluxus and contacted George Maciunas, who was living in New York. Maciunas corresponded with him and sent him Fluxus material, which Vučićević included in the publication Rok, put out by Bora Ćosić.

In 1967, Vučićević made this prescient statement, which I believe sums up his attitude toward art:

DOWN WITH ART, LONG LIVE LIFE!
(Mayakovsky)

If after next fifty years Fluxus finds itself in possession of the historical
and social status Dada enjoys today then
all Fluxus activities will have been in
vain.
Every anti-art gesture is inevitably and
inextricably coupled with so-called art
and is finally assimilated by it. The desti-
ny of Dada bears witness to this. At this
stage anti-art activity should represent
only a small part of Fluxus program.
(Performer of anti-art gestures finds him-
self in the position of worm in some sorts
of cheese who imagines that he is undermi-
ning cheese with his burrowing when in fact
giving it a piquant taste.) Such as it is
it should be more in the nature of Chinese
Red Guards’ undertakings.
Primary tasks of Fluxus (based on Maciunas
letter to Tomas Schmit, January 1964) should
be in the area of everyday life.
Therefore is proposed the compiling of
FLUXUS MANUAL OF EVERYDAY LIFE
a) Fluxus enrichment of basic everyday
activities (eating, work, sexual intercourse
etc. etc);
b) creation of n e w activities.
Fluxus should be interested not in artist
but in man.

Meeting Biljana Tomić and Jesa Denegri

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

On our second and last evening in Belgrade, we dined with Biljana Tomić and Jesa Denegri, a remarkable couple of art historians and curators who for several decades directly influenced the Yugoslav, and later Serbian, experimental art scene. In the early 1970s, Jesa, as curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, exhibited art by the most experimental and progressive members of the local art scene, including Marina Abramović and Rasa Todosijević. At the same time, Biljana, herself a poet, mixed visual poetry and performance with other contemporary art production while running the gallery of the Students Cultural Center. She also established direct contacts with the Italian Arte Povera movement and the Slovenian OHO group. The stories Biljana and Jesa shared with us added so much to our understanding of the Yugoslav experimental art scene in the 1970s that by the time dessert arrived, we had decided that this could not possibly be our final meeting with them, and that we should see them again, in New York.

May 30th: Belgrade

Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

During our morning meeting at the temporary headquarters of the Museum of Contemporary Art, curators Dejan Sretenović, Branko Dimitrijević, and Zoran Erić shared with us the history of the institution as well as stories of its difficult present. Founded in 1958 as a Museum of Modern Art with the aim of collecting Yugoslav art, the museum faced the challenge of defining its new role as the Serbian Museum of Contemporary Art after the dissolution of the Yugoslav state. Since 2007, it has been even more challenged by the lack of a proper exhibition space. The museum produced a traveling project, Museum on the Move, that enabled at least parts of the collection to be shown around the country. The curators prepared a real book feast for us: numerous exhibition catalogues of their recent projects and rare historical artists’ publications from the 1960s and 1970s occupied a huge wooden table around which we eagerly gathered. We also received a few of these books as a generous gift to our MoMA Library. Among them was a copy of Political Practices of (post-)Yugoslav Art, a publication that we had encountered before in various institutions and had read in preparation for our visit to Serbia. Even though MoMA’s Library holds a copy of it, this red book had become, by this stage of our trip, an object of personal desire to every single one of us.

Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade

Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art

By Paulina Pobocha

Currently there is no museum devoted to exhibiting modern or contemporary art in Belgrade, a city where neo-avant-garde art practice flourished during the 1970s. The building that had been home to the Museum of Contemporary Art has stood abandoned near the banks of the Sava River since 2007, awaiting restoration. The windows are broken, and grasses and other vegetation have overtaken the landscape, still inhabited by the outdoor sculptures placed there more than a decade ago. The museum’s staff works out of temporary offices located in a mid-century residence initially intended for the U.S. ambassador and directly across the street from the “House of Flowers,” Tito’s mausoleum. At the moment, their collection is in storage and inaccessible.

Kunsthistorisches Mausoleum

By Roxana Marcoci

The last stop in Belgrade was a visit with curator Jelena Vesić to the Kunsthistorisches Mausoleum, a space named after the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that could easily be described as a tomb of art history. In two adjacent rooms, this Mausoleum contains original paintings of illustrations from two canonical books of art history: A Concise History of Modern Painting by Herbert Read and the History of Art by H.W. Janson.

May 31st: Berlin

Berlin Biennale

By Roxana Marcoci

On our last day in Berlin we met with Gabi Horn, director of Kunst-Werke, and Joanna Warsza, associate curator of the Berlin Biennale, who took us on a walk through the exhibition. Titled Forget Fear, the biennale’s starting question, as posed by Artur Żmijewski, was, “What can art do for you?” The show focused on the intersection between the global Occupy protests, the Arab Spring movements, and the art world. Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar stamped people’s passports both in Palestine and in West Germany near Checkpoint Charlie, a symbolic location that echoes the wall dividing Israel from the occupied territories. Dutch artist Jonas Staal built an installation of hanging banners and an architectural model titled New World Summit, which functioned as an alternative parliament for representatives of organizations on international terrorist lists, who were invited to debate the limits of current democratic systems. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles conceived a mural-scale display of the front pages of the daily tabloid PM, published in Ciudad Juarez, one of the most dangerous border cities in Mexico. Each front page featured a soft porn image alongside a picture of a gruesome crime. In Berlin, at sites with historic connections to the Holocaust and deportations, Polish artist Łukasz Surowiec planted birch seedlings from the area around the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Occupy Museums filled the entire downstairs of KW, raising questions about the relationship between activism and cultural institutions—a relationship somewhat weakened here, since the movement’s leaders were paid by the biennale’s organizers to come to Berlin to be part of the show.

“Forget Fear”: 7th Berlin Biennale

Tomas Schmit Archiv

By Gretchen Wagner

In Berlin, members of the group visited the Tomas Schmit Archiv, administered by Barbara Wien and Wilma Lukatsch. Creating drawings, texts, and books, Schmit began submitting his works to George Maciunas in 1962 with the idea that they would be included in publications and festivals. Eventually, his involvement grew, and he worked with Maciunas to produce Fluxus Editions, typing up handwritten scores and translating texts. Upon Schmit’s death, in 2006, Wien and Lukatsch published his final two publications and founded the archive. Their goal is to compile an illustrated catalogue raisonné online and to collect the complete correspondence with Scmit’s peers, including a number of artists involved with Fluxus during the 1960s. Once launched, this will be an incredible asset to researchers.

John Cage at Akademie der Künste

By Barbara London

Dr. Wulf Herzogenrath, a knowledgeable old friend, veteran curator, and museum director, , guided the group through John Cage und …, a gem of an exhibition that he co-organized with Barbara Nierhoff-Wielk at the Akademie der Künste. Extraordinary lifelong art historical research radiated out of the compact galleries. We all discovered new Cage connections. Most revelatory was Alexej von Jawlensky’s painting Meditation (1934), acquired by Cage at age twenty-two. Displayed on an adjacent wall were late 1940s tapestries by Anni Albers. They had the same playful geometries as Cage’s own drawings of that time. Another insight could be found between Cage’s score for his composition Apartment House 1776 (1976) and Duchamp’s La Boîte en Valise (1941/66). We all left savoring the experience and wanting more.

“John Cage und …” Exhibition at the Akademie der Kuenste

Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin

By Barbara London

After a delightful lunch with Media Archive curator Henriette Huldisch and director Udo Kittelmann, our group fanned out through Hamburger Bahnhof’s vast spaces. These had more than quadrupled since the building opened in 1996 as the Museum für Gegenwart. While I enjoyed seeing Bruce Nauman’s installation Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care, first experienced in 1984 at Leo Castelli’s Green Street Space, I spent most of my time in Anthony McCall’s exhibition Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture. Where else would I ever again enter such a cathedral-like space, plunged into hazy darkness and experiencing McCall’s sculptural installations, which consist solely of projected white light? I moved among the slowly shifting, geometric light shafts thinking about the intangible nature of much contemporary art.

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