ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Monthly Archive: July 2024

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Christopher Williams-Wynn ·

“Ende statt Wende”: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s Typewritings and the Critique of German Reunification

When checking the mail in either of the two Germanys in February 1990, one might have expected to find the usual mixture of bills and junk, as well as personal correspondence and official letters. More unusually, the mailbox might have contained an SOS message: “This is a cry for help!” Written as a plea for support, notably in English, this short text called on individuals to write to the parliamentary bodies of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and decried the destruction of “social circumstances and rights” in the GDR. This distress signal had been … Read more

A tapestry made of wires forms an image reminiscent of a Yugoslav-era print of a worker pumping her fist in the air.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Hella Wiedmer-Newman ·

The Aesthetics of Economic Migration: nGbK’s Gastarbeiter 2.0 Exhibition

Gastarbeiter 2.0: Arbeit means Rad, at nGbK Berlin, April 13 – June 16, 2024

Jelena Fužinato’s mobile structure Builder’s Daughter: Everything is Peachy stands at the entrance to Gastarbeiter 2.0: Arbeit means Rad, an ambitious new exhibition hosted by the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK). Composed from the same gleaming chrome as all of the installations in the exhibition, the piece takes the form of scaffolding holding a landscape painting of the artist’s home in Prijedor (Bosnia and Herzegovina), which was assembled with the help of a group of hired workers. Able to be freely moved around the … Read more

A book cover featuring a black and white photograph of artist Šejla Kamerić leaning against a blank wall, outdoors. The title of the book (I am Jugoslovenka! Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism) appears over the image in the lower part, along with the author's name, Jasmina Tumbas.

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Dorothé Orczyk ·

Jugoslovenka as an Act of Resistance

Jasmina Tumbas, I am Jugoslovenka! Feminist performance politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 344 pp.

Reading the first chapter of Jasmina Tumbas’ publication I am Jugoslovenka! made me smile and think of my mother. The author cites Bojana Pejić talking about wearing original Levi’s jeans. My mother grew up in socialist—explicitly not communist—Poland, and moved to the Netherlands in the 1980s, when she was in her twenties. When I bought my first pair of jeans, she told me she got her first pair from Yugoslavia, where Western commodities were so much easier to obtain. Through … Read more

An installation view of a museum with white walls and a glossy gray floor. We are looking into a broad corner of the museum, and in the space we see three-dimensional displays of textile works, some mounted on rectangular frames. The works are brightly colored, with a combination of organic, wavy patterns and (in the work furthest from us) silhouettes that recall rockets or spaceships. There is also a video monitor mounted on the raised floor section closest to us.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Sara Blaylock ·

Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc 1960s-1980s

Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc 1960s-1980s, at Walker Art Center, November 11, 2023 – March 10, 2024; Phoenix Art Museum, April 17, 2024 – September 15, 2024; and Vancouver Art Gallery, December 14, 2024 – April 21, 2025

Thirty-two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the exhibition Multiple Realities offers a geographically expansive introduction to the creative autonomy that existed behind the Iron Curtain. To the average—which is to say non-specialist—viewer, Multiple Realities provides an intelligible, though not altogether nuanced, view of the Cold War East as a space ruled by ideological inflexibility. Nevertheless, … Read more