
Sexual desire is engendered by the lack of a fetishized object. In the developed prosperous capitalist societies the materiality on which unconscious desire can be projected is ubiquitous as every commodity and social relation has use and surplus value. The pay-off for the transition from a distributive economy with the scanty objects of private enjoyment to the capitalist mode of production is an often-overlooked aspect in the analysis of the changing sexual landscape of the post-socialist period.
The presented video works serve as an example of the contingency of desire on social and economic relations. The period following the disintegration of the socialist block is justifiably referred to as the stage of primitive capital accumulation in Eastern Europe. “Privatization,” the sale of industries to foreign investors, and the imperative of personal success, demonstrated the monstrosity of global neoliberal capitalism. In the capitalist societies at the stage of primitive accumulation, the phantasm of libidinal enjoyment is present, – in conditions of abject poverty though, this enjoyment is almost impossible to achieve. This is because sex is far too often used as currency or barter for the material fulfillment of attractive fantasies. Sex and the accumulation of resources have become so intertwined in the post-socialist unconscious, that the phantasms of sexual pleasure (or of access to an attractive body) became allocated in the same register as the phantasms of economic and political power. Bodies freed from totalitarian oppression enter another violent struggle as commodified and alienated bodies. For the viewers of this screening chapter, it becomes clear that sex is not associated with pleasure and happiness, but instead is indexed negatively as oppression, violence, and inequality.
In Boryana Rossa’s solo video performance The Moon and the Sunshine (2000), we see only the ambiguous traces of gender antagonism: the blue marks on the body of the artist could be hickeys but also, they could be signs of violence. Distinctive elements clearly position the artwork in the post-socialist context. Kristina Inčiūraitė’s video work Order (2004) narrates a contradiction between the power that female police officers are endowed with and the constraints imposed on them by a system of gender binary. The images of the dry and cold public space amplify this contradiction when set against the sound which could have been recorded during an innocent sleepover party. Mare Tralla and Vika Begalska take a cheeky feminist stance on the nascent hegemonies of male art critique and on English as the single language with global ambition. Mare Tralla’s video documents her performance where the artist showers her male critics with affection. The work Kiss (1996), which has never been shown internationally, is both a slap and a pinch to the nascent patronizing art patriarchy spawned by the imperative of success. The tension between the female and male protagonists of Sanja Iveković & Dalibor Martinis video piece Chanoyu (1983) parallels another binary – that of “East” and “West.” A feminist critique of the Western hegemony articulated by Eastern Europe informs this work’s contemporary relevance. In Vika Begalska’s Welcome (2004), we quickly realize that it is not the hierarchies of the globalized patriarchal world order but the female pleasure that runs the show. Begalska intentionally places herself in a subordinate role of a student which endows the ‘teacher’ with a power to punish her, but also makes him bound to follow her commands. Ja i AIDS (eng. Me and AIDS) (1993) by Artur Żmijewski was made when the existence of queer sexuality was acknowledged in public discourse and immediately misplaced as a dangerous source of a disease. The AIDS crisis made visible the violence of authoritative power which presents itself as benevolent, and also fostered alliances between the groups which are arbitrarily excluded and stigmatized.
Subsequently, in the conditions of abject poverty, associated with the period following the disintegration of the socialist bloc, sexuality and gender were often used as currency or barter for material resources and leveraged in the economy of attention. Parallel to this, we witness that gender binary can be seen as an ontological concept. When its immanent conflict is reflected in relationships with real or implied others, femininity and sex can also be instruments of rebellion and resistance against these invisible hierarchies.
Curated by Tatiana Bogacheva
The project Obscene West. In Honey of the Kaunas Artists’ House is named after Eglė Rakauskaitė’s performance/video installation Meduje (in Honey) made in 1996. It analyzes the issues of gender roles and sexuality in the changing 1990s and examines the manifestations of feminist movements in Lithuanian art as well as in other post-socialist countries. The project Obscene West. In Honey is curated by Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė and Edvinas Grinkevičius, funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
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The audiovisual works of the eigth chapter “Obscene West and Flickering Love Bites” give us glimpses of the feminist video and performance art in the early post-socialist period. The capitalist mode of (artistic) production and the inclusion of the Eastern European countries in the global economy are the material background of the works which use the themes of femininity, gendered relations, sexuality, sexual perversion, and violence to articulate a critical reflection on the complex ramifications of the post-socialist condition in art and broader society.
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“Imagined Community VIII: My Significant Others” stirs up cultural narratives that have been excluding significant herstories. Five audiovisual works by female artists present feminist forebears as well as undiscovered inspirational female figures, who struggle to become part of the official artistic and political history. Women artists enter into a dialog with overlooked or fictitious personalities from the cultural field and thereby touch upon cultural narratives that frame HerStories worth re-telling.
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ONLINE: Screening Chapter #6 1/2
Signals From Roots To Leaves: A post-botanical assembly
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Curated by
- Suza Husse
“Signals From Roots To Leaves” approaches the Botanical Garden in Olomouc as a site where post-socialist and post-colonial ecologies and cultures intersect. Here, Agave, Ceiba, Rubber tree, Reeds and Carnation who live in the palm house, the subtropical greenhouse and under the open sky in Olomouc are convened together with a group of artists and healers whose work and knowledge resonates with specific trans*species connections and ecological histories they carry.→ See the screening dates in the Program
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The screening chapter “ReTopia” acknowledges “post-socialism” not only as a continental but also as a global phenomenon, though with palpable regional specificity and intensity. It looks at transitional shifts and modes of remembrance of historical processes that evoke forms – rejected, outmoded, disposed from power, gender political, architectural, and even full of potential. Without being afraid of utopian ideology, it looks back and forth and sideways in search of radically different futures.
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Entwining autobiographical, historical, and fictional narratives, this screening program examines generational, personal, and political frictions, breaks and entanglements, taking place in the dystopian context of post-1989. The tension bears down on the sphere of the personal and the political maintained through the relationship of the four figures: the figure of Neighbor, the figure of Mother, the figure of Lover and the figure of Other.
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The chapter examines the body as a collective, as a singular entity, as a social choreography of an alliance of states, as an organless, cognitive-capitalist, cerebral network, as a corporeal reading instrument of past, former socialist indices, as a place of textual and discursive inscription, but also as a genuine place of affective encounters and material practices. The curators focus on video works and films that flare up the affective, somaesthetic, relational and transformative potentials of the body after 1989 / 1991.
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Cosmos Cosmetics: Unresting Memoryscapes and Corpofictions
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Curated by
- Miona Bogović ,
- Suza Husse ,
- Suzana Milevska
Political protocol tends to dispossess, overwrite, and refurbish unwanted narratives. Parallel to this, there are new agencies that enhance the intersections, reciprocities, and movements between bodies, spaces, objects, and memories. The video art and experimental film works of COSMOS COSMETICS: Unresting Memoryscapes and Corpofictions are concerned with architectural, corporeal, and phantasmatic materializations of internalized mnemonic, and bio-political regimes. Meanwhile they address surface porosities and subcutaneous layers of post-socialist cities. Hence this chapter of screenings in D’EST brings together artistic strategies and methods for unsettling, decontaminating, and queering artificial mono-histories, which stem from the urge to untag and distance the subject from the constraints of conformity, imposed belonging to a certain ethnic group or community, and identitarian politics in general.→ See the screening dates in the Program
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Performing Words, Uttering Performance
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Curated by
- Inga Lāce ,
- Anna Bitkina ,
- Maria Veits ,
- TOK (The Creative Association of Curators)
The changing role and function of language before and after the “transition” cannot be discussed without considering the dimension of authoritarian speech acts in the last phase of socialism. Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak shares the observation that during the authoritarian speech act, sign and reference, language and gesture, word and action merge into each other. This thesis is the foundation for an understanding of the variety of linguistic and performative experiments in post-socialist video art. The curators will focus on video works that reflect upon shifts in language and meaning and employ diverse silent, verbal, performative, activist, and other strategies to discuss collective and personal memory, identity, power relations, gender roles, and socio-political change.→ See the screening dates in the Program
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The Suspension and Excess of Time
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Curated by
- Kathrin Becker ,
- Jana Seehusen
The curatorial selection The Suspension and Excess of Time explores the role of time within a period of radical political, social, and economical change. The selected video works focus on the changes different societies were going through during the Perestroika era, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the soviet empire. Paying tribute to speculative temporalities, curators Becker and Seehusen will trace people’s everyday experiences in the former “East” and “West” before and after 1989 / 1991.→ See the screening dates in the Program
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In 1957, Roland Barthes stated that in “Western” mythology the USSR would be a world halfway between the Earth and Mars to exemplify that the communist world was considered as foreign as another planet. Similar to Barthes’ literary method in his Mythologies book, curator, filmmaker and artist Xandra Popescu scripted three semi-fictional short stories to introduce major paradigms of her screening program O’ Mystical East and West.
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