The indefinite period of standing in line represents a multi-faceted experience of ‘transition’. Chantal Akerman gets to the heart of this experience in her 1993 film D’EST (From the East), shot during the period of upheaval of the 1990s. With the filmic travelogue that moves from Russia to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic across the former GDR and to Belgium, her documentary essay film shows people standing wordlessly in endless queues. It thereby creates the cinematic feeling of being-in-between – a situation experienced by people at the time.
Starting with this testament to historical transformation, the feeling of being in transition – as a condition between the past and the imagined future – forms the point of intersection for the screening chapter’s works. Challenging the idea of isolating the past, The Suspension and Excess of Time follows a conception of historicity in which a multiplicity of times coexist, opening up parallel perspectives. The selected video works follow a chrono-political understanding of history. They deal with different temporal poetics that unfold as durational documentation (Józef Robakowski); live actions (Ulrike Rosenbach); live sculptures (Eglė Rakauskaitė / Rakė); and re-enactments (Sanja Iveković). They move between the historical imagining of life in a transcended system (Sasha Pirogova) to the envisioning of a time machine (Clarissa Thieme). Understood as a transformation process with multiple trajectories, feminist and political practices stand in the focus of this screening chapter. These demonstrate the time-transcending influence of political and social structures, the power of influence of religion and patriarchy as conditions that render personal daily life political. As a structural principle, the interaction of different layers of time within the work threads its way through the screening as a whole, whether in the form of confrontation with different historical and religious models of identity, the actualization of political and economic transformation in Eastern Europe at the end of the 20th century, or processes of technological or physiological, human development and change. The performatively staged views (which look backward and forward) intersect through the concept of history, which only becomes manifest in its actualization. Spanning an arc from the 1970s through the 1990s and into the present, cross- and back-references abound.
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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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