Uitz Hall
The central theme of the exhibition is the social and artistic potential of agency and provocation: to examine whether the activity of the dissident artists in Eastern Europe’s party states critically addressed the regime, and whether they were concerned with proposing artistic, social and political alternatives in relation to actual problems. One kind of artistic response to the dictates of cultural policy was to consciously turn away from social issues and deal with art-immanent and conceptual experiments, or work on expanding the means of artistic expression—in the face of expectations that art should reflect socialist values and serve to represent the building of socialism. At the same time, the regulations and prohibitions pertaining to social behaviour as well as the constant intervention and control of professional and political authorities undoubtedly radicalised a number of artists. But it is still difficult to assess the critical charge of the artistic positions and attitudes that emerged in this arena.
When assessing the critical force of Eastern European
counter-culture, confrontations with state power usually come in the forefront, and less attention is devoted to other
aspects of the totalitarian, or later paternalist, system also extending control over the private sphere, whereby modes of affronting these efforts are also lesser discussed. Another known but scarcely addressed phenomenon is how the circle of progressive artists of the era was united in its opposition to the common enemy: state power, and how this union entailed a slackened awareness of some oppressive and anti-democratic features of the prevailing order that affected other social groups—especially when those oppressive features were not peculiar to socialism as a system. The exhibition deliberately lines up life strategies that assign the private sphere as the terrain of resistance against the social order–in the midst of a strongly male dominated official and “parallel” public sphere.
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Small Gallery
The works exhibited in the Small Gallery present cases in which public interaction, dialogue and interpersonal communication as well as the expression of opinion is feasible but often takes absurd forms.
Recalling the expressions and phrases used to communicate commands and prohibitions under socialist rule can be helpful in understanding the kind of parodies and language use of the counter-culture, their recourse to the techniques of doublespeak or double negation, overidentification, and self-censorship.
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Basement Gallery
The works exhibited in the Small Gallery present cases in which public interaction, dialogue and interpersonal communication as well as the expression of opinion is feasible but often takes absurd forms.
Recalling the expressions and phrases used to communicate commands and prohibitions under socialist rule can be helpful in understanding the kind of parodies and language use of the counter-culture, their recourse to the techniques of doublespeak or double negation, overidentification, and self-censorship.
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Projects in public space
The impact of the political and economic system change can nowhere be so clearly traced as in the public space. The exhibition at the ICA, too, is accompanied with public art projects unfolding in public space. Throughout the past twenty years, much of state socialism’s collective occasions as well as the characteristic urban zones hosting them have disappeared. Past events have been replaced by new festivities of the democratic successor states or politically motivated protests and demonstrations organised by single-issue interest groups. The property relations of common goods have also changed; a new array of privately owned leisure or consumption spaces and services have appeared, often only offering limited or selective access. The usage of public spaces has thus been modified, and this entailed the decline of their centralised maintenance. From the perspective of the formation of civil society, the fact that public space has increasingly become the arena of fights and campaigns defined by domestic politics, also has enormous importance.
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