ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Tagged: GDR

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

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Constanze Fritzsch ·

The Law of the Underground: The Critique of Gender, Performance Art, and the Second Public Sphere in the Late GDR

Angelika Richter, Das Gesetz der Szene. Genderkritik, Performance Art und zweite Öffentlichkeit in der späten DDR [The Law of the Underground: The Critique of Gender, Performance Art, and the Second Public Sphere in the Late GDR] (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2019), 408 pp.

In 2019, German art historian and curator Angelika Richter published her doctoral thesis The Law of the Underground: The Critique of Gender, Performance Art, and the Second Public Sphere in the Late GDR, in the German language. This book is worth reviewing even three years after its initial publication due to its meticulous research and … Read more