ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Monthly Archive: May 2000

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Javor Gardev (Sofia) ·

For a New Ecstatic Theater

Javor Gardev, one of Bulgaria’s most innovative directors, lives and works in Sofia. He is a member and co-founder of the Triumviratus Art Group, a collective whose activities focus on the theater, performance, literature, video art, and the radio. Now that theater in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc has the freedom to speak its mind, it seems to have lost all interest in doing so. Born in the 1970s, the youngest generation of theater directors, with Gardev among them, does not seem interested in social concerns, preferring more existential dilemmas and the art/life divide instead. from its current … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Ekaterina Dyogot (Moscow) ·

Catastrophe and Hedonism: An Unnostalgic Look at Russian Art of the Last Decade

In the Russian Art scene, the 1990s seemed like a never-ending decline where no activity lasted longer than two seasons, either because of a lack of money or simply due to overwhelming incompetence. Whatever did survive, usually funded by the state or by Western sponsors, soon unraveled intellectually. Being more concerned with sheer survival, the country at large did not show any interest in modernist values. Modern art in the new Russia of the 1990s was not capable of gaining a powerful position for itself, yet it was also unable to settle for dignified marginality–art, too, was fighting for survival. … Read more