ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Tagged: Cold War

An installations with archival documents and images.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Karolina Majewska-Güde ·

Some notes on transnational art history in practice: Revolutionary Romances? Global Art Histories in the GDR at the Albertinum

Revolutionary Romances? Global Art Histories in the GDR at Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, November 4, 2023–June 2, 2024

A decolonial discourse that has materialized in exhibition practices in recent years has set us on a course of unlearning and exploring potentially lesser-known histories. The exhibition Revolutionary Romances? Global Art Histories in the GDR at the Albertinum in Dresden (November 4, 2023–June 2, 2024) shows that we still have much to learn about the histories and forgotten cultural heritage of the Cold War. With two hundred historical art objects, most of them from the Dresden State Art Collections (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Kata Benedek ·

Re/Opening the DAAD Archives

IF THE BERLIN WIND BLOWS MY FLAG: ART AND INTERNATIONALISM BEFORE THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL AT DAADGALERIE, N.B.K., AND GALERIE IM KÖRNERPARK, SEPTEMBER 9, 2023 – JANUARY 14, 2024   

The exact aim of the large-scale, three-site exhibition, When the Berlin Wind Blows My Flag: Art and Internationalism Before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, is difficult to define. The first sentence of the exhibition’s introductory text promised to offer insight “into the history of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (Berliner Künstlerprogramm—BKP)” and through that “the art scene in West Berlin before the Wall came down.” Based on this promise, … Read more

Print Content / Volume 9 Issue 2

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 by Brynn Hatton ·

On Impossibility: Finding Vietnam in a Jordanian-Soviet Film Archive

In 2014, an abandoned collection of over 900 16mm and 35mm film canisters was uncovered in a storage locker in Amman, Jordan. Initial findings show that the films were likely exported from Russia to Jordan between the late 1960s and early 1990s as part of a Soviet cultural exchange program, and among them are are a number of propaganda films made to highlight relations between Vietnam, Russia, and concurrent political struggles in the Arab Middle East. Work on the archive continues despite recent restrictions on researcher access levied by state custodians. This essay positions the entire archive as an aggregate … Read more

book cover

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Stella Pelše ·

Valdis Āboliņš. The Avant-garde, Mailart, the New Left, and Cultural Relations during the Cold War

Ieva Astahovska and Antra Priede-Krievkalne, eds., Valdis Āboliņš. The Avant-garde, Mailart, the New Left, and Cultural Relations during the Cold War (Riga: Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2019), 662 pp.

Few publications deal with Latvian artists in exile who settled in various Western countries after they (or their parents) fled the approaching Soviet army at the end of the Second World War.(For a useful introduction to this topic, see the catalogue: Dace Lamberga, ed., Latviešu māksla trimdā – Latvian Art in Exile (Riga: LNMM & Neputns, 2013).) Costly and time-consuming research abroad is often necessary to tell the … Read more