ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Monthly Archive: May 2001

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Luchezar Boyadijev (Sofia) ·

“Small Talk”

Group exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia. April-June, 2001.

By definition, “small talk” refers to those seemingly insignificant things that we say in between the periods of discussions concerned with important, universal matters. Small talk may not change the world, but it reveals the concerns of our daily lives, it may be about a small idea, a small problem, a small joy, a small disorder, a small defeat, or a small victory.

We actually engage in small talk all the time, with friends and colleagues, family members and people we know well but only meet on the … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Anna Sokolina (New York) ·

Alternative Identities: Conceptual Transformations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Architecture

The development of Russian architecture, from the neo-classicism of the 1950s to the postmodern trends of the 1990s, followed socialist and post-socialist economic and political cycles. Soviet architecture was essentially an element in the socio-political process of the construction of communism. The ideological blueprint for Soviet architecture was introduced during the earliest years of the Soviet Union when what was important in architecture was architecture’s political content rather than its structural laws or those of its physical environment.

In the early socialist age, new models of living space were developed which the architects defined as spaces for the collective. In … Read more