The fact that art is especially necessary in difficult times, because it means human freedom is often noted in Sunday performances in a rich part of the world. In the worst case, the savings decision follows on Monday. How actual art can actually be for a democratic understanding of society and its resistance can always be tested in Eastern Europe.
Recently, it was especially bright in Warsaw, where from October 2024 a snowy cube was provided to the Stalinist Palace of Culture in the city center, which extends 240 meters into the sky. The building of the modern museum in accordance with the plans of the American architect Thomas Fifer is a symbol of departure for vibrating Warsaw and at the same time for a politically divided country. Since the formula is also applied to Poland: the cities are chosen by liberal, the country is conservative for right -wing nationality. This was recently confirmed again in the election at the Presidential Chancellery, when the right -wing conservative Karol Navroki ultimately prevailed against the liberal Rafal Trzaskovski – thanks to the votes from the rural regions of the East and some parts of the south of Poland.
When the Cynics Republic Plac Difilad exhibition was opened in vast Warsaw rooms with a white cube, people flocked like a pop concert. You immediately felt that everything that was happening here in this museum enjoys the greatest attention. But unlike art cities, such as Berlin, where the cool arrogance of a fashionable blanket gives a tone in such events, it seems to be not eastern and impossible. At this exhibition, only bulky ones were visible. Among other things, the art of political resistance to the socialist regime of Eastern Europe since the 1960s, mainly photos, video and performing art, which was almost completely forgotten after the 1990s of political upheavals. At least in Western Europe you knew almost nothing about it.
About 150 works of art since then entered into dialogue with the work from the 2007 museum, which lived in the model building of the White Cube since October 2024. They come from the Austrian collection of contacts based in Vienna, which systematically studies the art of this time in Eastern Europe for more than 20 years and systematically collects artifacts, which are often created secret. Being a long -term partner in cooperation between the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the contact collection was already involved in the opening of a new building in October.
“Where is champagne?” The founder calls
“Contact”, this name is due to the fact that the word in this spelling form exists in German, Czech and Slavatsky. Slovak artist Julius Colller has used this word since the end of the 1960s in his anti -hackings and labors; The Czech artist JIXX KOVANDA used it to point out the interrupted communication between art and the public, as well as between the communist bloc and the Western world.
“Where is champagne?” The founder of the collection, Boris Marta, calls at the opening of the exhibition of Warsaw. Marta is the general director of the First Foundation, who created a collection of contacts as a non -profit organization in collaboration with the First Group Wiener Bank First, which was also represented in Eastern and Central Europe. Martha is delighted with the “wonderful and strong” sign based on the museum in relation to the cultural palace. This is a “manifestation of the relevance of art for society and democracy.”
Marta stands on the stairs of the museum, where the raw tower as a hummingbird and the sounding center of the show in the series settles in a large installation of sound and image. Temporary forests from a typical construction site of steel rods require the movement of the audience. It knocks out and flickers everywhere. The smoked, intimate clips of the 1970s compete with aesthetics with a high glossy current video, a coarse-grained documentary with complex technologies, knocking down soundtracks with noise that the museum staff in the waist for waiting and starting old videos again.
You work using self -esteem
The French curator of the show, Pierre Black Blanc, considers the installation as a polyphonic assessment, the testimony of which is free from specifications. The name “Cynic Republic is a deflate plate” belongs to the Greek school of cynicars from the fifth to the Christian age, the most important representative of which was Diogenes. Cynics were looking for anarchist happiness in asceticism, renunciation and material independence.
The exact name, especially for neo-avantgard-art from the collection of contacts. It mainly consists of documented speeches. They owe their barren material at that time a defect, often they work with means of self -opening and humor. If, for example, a rude video, a loud video, watches a serious look at the ritual shortening of his beard. Or, when the Croatian performer Slavic Tolja sits between vodka and a bottle of whiskey and always sniffs from a shaker, in which both high -quality deputies of the two worlds lead to an explosive mixture. The result is fainting, the name of the video is a rather far -sighted “globalization”. The Polish artist Tomash Macchinsky, who was hardly known in the West, in turn, in turn, glided into a new person, ahead of the American star artist Cindy Sherman and sang in his piercing costumes.
Boris Marta recalls: “When we founded“ contact ”20 years ago, there was an arrogance of the Western art world, which has not yet accepted the East as an equivalent.” With a collection of nomadic contacts, the objects of which are borrowed free of charge will be investigated, a new head of the “European, not yet written art history”, which will once contribute to European identity, will be investigated.
From the very beginning, the collection has closely collaborated with local scenes, for example, with the Slovenian art historian Igor Obl, who since 1986 has been a curator in Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana and since 1945 has been engaged in the art of eastern and central Europe. A collection dedicated to the early prize named after him, which is awarded every two years in his house.
The first Austrian Sparkasse was built in 1819
At the headquarters of the Vienna Fund, HEPHZIBAH DRUML, manager for the program and production of the Contacts and Catherine Clingan collection as the head of the cultural unit of the fund for motivation for the collection. Klingan explains that the thorough story is connected with the First Austrian Sparkasse, which was founded in 1819 from general Blagia. When the first bank expanded to the eastern European countries in the 1990s, the fund followed it. HEPHZIBAH DRUML indicates the purpose of the collection: “It is also about the fact that the segment of contemporary art in Eastern Europe does not disappear in any private collections or galleries, but this is processed, and the public remains present.”
In a quick episode, the contact collection is involved in exhibitions, Warsaw Schauer has already ended after a short -term perspective. Work with the collection will soon be shown in Kosovar as a prize during the Autostrada Biennale, or currently in the Slovak capital of Bratislav in the independent artistic network Tranzit, which has not yet suffered from cleaning the right population of Martina Shimkovichov. “Limal Ecology” also applies to questions about climate and migration change. Already consistently, as the fund also fulfills a kind of democracy at the exhibition of its bulky art.
And it is important when in Germany large companies are currently in a hurry to collect their collections in Germany: the objects of collection of contacts belong to associations that act independently, they are not investments. They cannot be sold to Erste with a bank or fund.
