The Tune in Screening program focuses on film production and popular music created in Yugoslavia from mid 60s to mid 70s. It presents a variety of materials, predominantly a 75-minute loop of experimental film and rock music that exemplify the openness and permissiveness of Yugoslavia’s brand of socialism when incorporating culture from the capitalist West. The Tune in Screening program demonstrates how imports from the West had a profound effect on the local society, arts and, especially, the public visibility of this psychedelic lifestyle and popular culture.

Tune in Screening: Psychedelic Moving Images from Socialist Yugoslavia is curated by Branko Franceschi and takes place at the Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, 29 Orchard Street, New York from 2 October 2 to 30 October 2011

For more information see:

http://www.residencyunlimited.org/residents/2011/10/branko-franceschi/

Lithuanian artists Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas will launch a new project entitled Split nik at the Moscow Biennale on 23 September and running until 30 October 2011.

The project is an investigation of a book, The Passing Age, published by Russian writer, Alexander Kukarkin, during the Cold War era, attacking Western decadent culture. We are inviting participation in dialogues about the Cold War and its legacies now, particularly in relation to the role of artists, writers, filmmakers, and books.

The artists are soliciting contributions to their ‘Future Cast’, either in person in the installation or online

ARTMargins will release its first issue in February 2012. The print publication joins the well-known ARTMargins website, which was started in 1999. ARTMargins will publish articles, essays, reviews, and interviews that critically reflect on Eastern European contemporary art and curatorship in an expanded context comprising Eurasia, North Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central Asia. Mindful of the different geo-political realities that characterize these regions and of the global economic forces that drive their development, ARTMargins invites artists, art theorists, art historians, and curators to reflect on what editor Sven Spieker has called the “thickened global margin.” Within the very fabric of a present moment characterized by different (and often incompatible) temporalities and national agendas, ARTMargins wants to help locate transversal commonalities and zigzagging trajectories that connect post-Socialist Eastern Europe with other regions. A far cry from the emphatic claims to homogeneity and universalism that characterized postmodern globalism, such an endeavor implies a shift in the definition of what it means to speak to, or from, the margins: away from the binary center-margin model (East/West) that dominated modernism and postmodernism alike to one that conceives of the periphery as a nomadic zone of contact in which the possibilities for a different future may be explored. ARTMargins will be as interested in following artists from Northern India as they chart a trajectory from Delhi to Warsaw, as it might investigate modernist tendencies in Moldovan art practice of the 1970s, or concurrent takes on global migration by photographers from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The point here is not to objectify the perceived or real similarities between heterogeneous regions of the world but rather to argue that there may be such a thing as an ever-widening (yet non-homogeneous) global periphery created and animated by artistic practices whose description and analysis cannot rely on the paradigms inherited from the pre-1989 era.

 

Unfolding Narratives: Art Histories in East-Central Europe After 1989

EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE SEMINAR SERIES 2010-2011
An initiative of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Art History Meets Art Theory
New Europe College-Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest, Romania
20-21 May, 2011

Seminar at NEC Draft Program

Previous seminar in Brno

From Russia to Poland and Romania, and from the Czech Republic to Yugoslavia and East Germany, Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe is an ambitious attempt to chart the changing realities of the eastern half of the continent, as seen through the eyes of artists, critics, photographers and curators.

http://blackdogonline.com/all-books/contemporary-art-in-eastern-europe.html

Feature: Shock of the New
‘Budapest’s Ludwig Museum takes the task of nurturing and reframing the nation’s most significant collection of contemporary art very seriously, with regular thematic refreshment of the permanent display and a strategic attitude towards the sensitive business of contemporary collecting. The exhibition Kind of Change is an instructive showcase of works acquired in the last two years…(more)’

Review: Csaba Nemes and Katarina Šević, Emotional Space, Knoll Galéria
‘Nationalism is approached in the work of these two highly-regarded artists not just as the manifestation of collective or individual experience, but as a phenomenon that operates through the construction of ‘emotional space’ within society.’

Review: Outpost Critical Space, Trafó Galéria
‘Outpost Critical Space sets out to explore the ‘post-apocalyptic mood’ that has settled on the region in wake of recent economic and political setbacks, through dramatic sculptural installations that can also be read as ironic comments on East European identity.’

Preview: Miklós Erdély, Vintage Galéria / Kisterem
‘A double bill of Miklós Erdély exhibitions at two of Budapest’s smallest but most influential commercial galleries provides a rare opportunity to encounter the work of one of Hungary’s most admired but least visible artists.’

In the Studio: Rudolf Pacsika
‘Children and people always find their own way between the buildings, taking short cuts across the grass. To tread on the grass and make your own path is very anti-social, but to do so is also a way to resist power, the power that made the buildings in the first place.’

Art Editors: Maja and Reuben Fowkes (translocal.org)
art@timeoutbudapest.hu

Time Out Budapest is available from all good (local) newsagents.

Kwiekulik, Shades of Red, 1971

The latest in a series of conferences on the strange afterlives of communism:

A conference curated by Elena Sorokina and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, assisted by Agata Jastrząbek. With contributions by Keti Chukhrov, Dessislava Dimova, Charles Esche, Suman Gupta, Vivian Rehberg, Nicoline van Harskamp, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor.

Through a series of polemic dialogues, we would like to trace different generations of intellectuals (artists, curators, philosophers, art historians) from the former East and West of Europe that deal with “shades of red”, the afterlives of Communism and its (un)expected turning points in its most recent philosophical and artistic reception.

Held at an innovative alternative education network in Belgium

http://brussels.thepublicschool.org/class/3256

Hungarian goverment is trying to take away TRAFÓ, the contemporary art house of Budapest, from the founders, the people without whose hard work, dedication and insight, Trafó would have never become what it is now. The goverment asked two artists to take over Trafó and make it their own house. It’s a dirty political game. They try to corrupt the contemporary art scene from the inside. The Trafó is an internationally acclaimed art house, where many international artists perform. We call upon all our international contacts, fellow artists and institutes, to support TRAFÓ. And we hope that the two companies ( Yvette Bozsik and Iván Markó ) that are asked to play along with this dirty political game, are stong and wise enough to say no.

Gyorgy Aczel

The latest issue of E Flux Journal has a detailed account of the campaign in Hungary by the rightwing government against leftist philosophers around Agnes Heller, the most famous disciple of Gyorgy Lukacs. Curator Livia Paldi concludes:

The contemporary marginalization of pluralistic and critical thinking and dissenting voices from the public sphere calls to mind not the realization of a vision of “twenty-first century Hungarian culture that occupies a significant place in world culture,” but rather, the cultural policy strategies of the decades preceding post-communist transition.

There seems to be a sense in which some kind of twisted revival of Gyorgy Aczel’s famous communist-era cultural policy of the Three T’s (supported, tolerated and forbidden) is on the cards.