Category: ARTMargins Online: Articles

Frankensteiner Hof, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Portikus, Städelsches Kulturinstitut Frankfurt – May 25 until August 25, 2002

Manifesta 4. Frankfurt/Main (various locations).

Since its foundation in 1996 Manifesta has been loosely dedicated to defining a “new Europe,” to responding to the new artistic developments in the whole European territory and offering a general idea of both the overall situation and the most outstanding issues and questions of European art, culture, and society.

Nevertheless, only the last installment in Ljubljana (2000), after Rotterdam (1996) and Luxembourg (1998), provided an opportunity for the show to inhabit a city that might actually exemplify such a … Read more

Lithuanian theater in the international context is being more widely associated with the personalities of particular directors. Whereas in a theatrical community of international standing Lithuania’s name is being enunciated and put forth, critics and enthusiasts tend to emphasize the role of stage director Eimuntas Nekrosius.

Lithuanian director Nekrosius is important enough to have already received the Italian Ubu award several times. The publishing house Ubulibri gives out their annual prizes to the best Italian theaters and to the best foreign production. Nekrosius was recognized for the best theater production in Italy last season for Othello, just as … Read more

Fiction Reconstructed. The Last Futurist Exhibition, Armory Show, Salon de Fleurus. Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, January 2002.

In January 2002, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, visitors could see the exhibition entitled Fiction Reconstructed: The Last Futurist Exhibition, which was originally produced by two institutions in Slovenia- the Gallery Skuc in Ljubljana and the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Celje.

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In the 1980s, several projects based on the reconstruction of works of art from the avant-garde took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where The Last Futurist Exhibition, by Kasimir Malevich (Belgrade), The International Exhibition of … Read more

Davaj! Russian Art Now. Aus dem Laboratorium der freien Künste in Russland (From the Laboratory of Free Arts in Russia) 10.1.2002 – 27.2.2002. Open Tue – Sun 1-8 p.m., closed on Mondays Postfuhramt, Oranienburger Strasse 35-36, D-10117 Berlin, Germany www.davaj.de

When I entered the “Davaj! Russian Art Now” showroom, my first impression was that I had somehow fallen into Ilya Kabakov’s 1993 installation “Noma”, which presented his fellow Moscow Conceptualists as inmates of a lunatic asylum.

The same white, shabby walls, the same central room, from which corridors led into various directions, the same cells in which the artists presented … Read more

Only a small area of the old medieval Bucharest, featuring narrow streets and historical buildings, escaped the demolition campaign initiated by Ceausescu in the 1980s. During the “black period” of Communism, intellectuals who enjoyed old books and old objects could view and buy them at a small gallery, named “Curtea Veche” [“Old princely court”] because it was placed opposite the medieval princely court, right at the center of historic Bucharest. This gallery is in fact a room of an old building, full of second-hand books, old maps, and modern art objects.

From the early 1980s through the present day, Marius … Read more

If artists use art to make political statements, is it legitimate to understand the blatantly political actions of politicians as performances and art?

If in some sense it is, does that allow us to see the performances of artists as models for the performances of ordinary citizens in their everyday lives, and can we then see both of these performances as the completion of or response to the performances initiated by a political ruler?

I hope to provide a preliminary and partial answer to these questions through my exegesis and interpretation of the Bucuresti 2000 architectural competition, a competition held … Read more

University of Fine Arts, Bucharest. June, 2001 

A successful exhibit of recent painting by Alexandru Radvan opened at the gallery of the University of Fine Arts in Bucharest at the end of last June. Radvan is an important player among those among young Romanian painters who have chosen figuration as a means of expression. Like them, Radvan has discovered, or rediscivered, the value of representation.

Radvan has organizes his dynamic compositions by means of a narrative thread. In this way he recovers universal myths (the Ghilgames saga, Ulysses’s fights in the war of Troy, or Arabian tales), giving them a … Read more

Considering all the drastic changes the face of Prague has endured during the last 10 years, the inside of Czech art institutions and galleries has actually seen very little transformation. Mass refurbishments continue to dominate the mise-en-scene of the city in a desperate attempt to catch up after the last 50 years of isolation, and although since 1989 Prague has quickly become one of the hottest tourist spots (“it’s just so cheap”) in all Europe, not everything sweeps easily under the rug.

Czechs, among other Post-Communists, were expected to immediately embrace the exact system they were taught to despise and … Read more

In Romania, the notion of privately funded cultural initiatives is still in its very early stages. Until only recently, wealthy members of Romanian society have been reluctant to contribute to the arts, and artists across all mediums have traditionally found it difficult to secure any degree of financial backing from the upper class. Three years ago, however, a wealthy marble manufacturer from Baia Mare was approached by an ambitious artist proposing the formation of a private museum for Romanian contemporary art. Together they created the Florean Museum, named after the wealthy marble magnate who sponsored its development. The foundation of … Read more

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

In 1989, the same year that British artists were responding to Thatcherite Britain by organizing art shows in warehouses, their Polish counterparts were trying to come to terms with a newly emerging political and social order that influenced and reshaped the Polish art scene.

The year 1989 marked Poland’s great economic crisis and, subsequently, the dramatic political transformation that took place in its aftermath. This, however, had been eased by the success of the “solidarity” movement and eventually led to the first free parliamentary elections in Poland. The end of the Communist era and the formation of the first freely … Read more