ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Monthly Archive: February 2007

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Yulia Tikhonova (New York) ·

Nostalgic Artifice – Modus R

Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, December 04-12, 2006

    We need to place ourselves in an area where politics and art are intertwined, where the resistant force of politics and the creative forces of art mutually affect each other, blurring the frontiers between them.
    –Suely Rolnik, “The Twilight of the Victim: Creating Quits Its Pimp, to Rejoin Resistance.”(S. Rolnik, “The Twilight of the Victim: Creation Quits Its Pimp, to Rejoin Resistance,” Zehar, no.51, (2003):36. www.arteleku.net.)

“Young and energetic” was the description that Alexander Esin gave to a group of Russian artists in his preface to the 2006 … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Barbara Wurm (Berlin) ·

A Past without a Present: Utopia and the Post-Communist-Hype

Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister (Eds.), The New Humankind. Biopolitical Utopias in Russia at the Beginning of the 20th Century. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005.

Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister (Eds.), At Zero Point. Positions of the Russian Avantgarde. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005.

Boris Groys, Anne von der Heiden and Peter Weibel. (Eds), Back from the Future. Eastern European Cultures in the Age of Post-Communism. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005.

These three books – two anthologies of poetical, philosophical and aesthetic-political texts written in Russia between 1906 and 1935, and the proceedings of a phenomenal conference held in Berlin (The Post-Communist … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Nia Tabakova (Sofia/London) ·

Christo in Bulgaria: the Act of Wrapping and the Communist Legacy (1935 – 1956)

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are probably the most elusive artistic couple in the contemporary art world. Their vast ephemeral projects across Europe and the US, each one existing for no more than several weeks and involving approximately ten years and hundreds of people to realize, claim to possess political and economical autonomy. In order to raise the millions of dollars required for a project to be completed, Christo produces a huge amount of preparatory drawings, collages, and maquettes, while Jeanne-Claude, who plays the role of a manager, PR, and an image maker of the artistic union, deals with them on the … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans (leuven) ·

The SocialEast Seminars: (Re-)Locating Eastern European Art

SocialEast Seminars. Manchester (Art and Ideology) and Budapest (Art and Documentary).

Recently the theoretical debate around art and visual culture in Eastern Europe has gained a new platform of discussion. Initiated by MYRIAD Manchester Metropolitan University, the SocialEast Forum focuses on regional art practices between the end of the Second World War and the fall of Communism in 1989-1991. The forum launched its program with a series of seminars during which scholars, curators, and artists from all over Europe contributed to a new understanding of art and culture in Eastern Europe. This review concerns two of the seminars that took … Read more