nothere

Joanne Richardson

nothereadmin — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 19:11:16 +0000

In Transit. Video, 30 min., 2008 – screenshot

Letter from Moldova, video, 28 min, 2009 – screenshot

Red Tours. video, in collaboration with David Rych, 48 min, 2010 – screenshot

Joanne Richardsons video trilogy consisting of the works In Transit (2008), Letter from Moldova (2009) and Red Tours (2010) addresses aspects of the dissolving of the communist idea in former communist countries. Richardson looks into and researches, how it is possible to not simply repeat the current narrative about the communist past. ”Postcommunism is not a new stage of history, it is a continuation of the cold war. In a similar way, it demands a categorical rejection of communism, a purely emotional condemnation, without analysis, without reflection. What has changed is that the West’s clichés about the Eastern bloc are now internalized by the other side, taking the place of remembering.”

Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor

nothereadmin — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 14:37:58 +0000

Long live and thrive Capitalism! installation view, Secession, Vienna, 2009

Floor Drawing, installation, 2009 and Poem, 7 min, film, super 8, 2009

Poem, 7 min, film, super 8, 2009

30 December 1926, installation, 2009

In their installation Long live an thrive capitalism! artists Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor refer to the propaganda posters that every ex-Communist-country-citizen does instantly recognize. While Communism/Socialism in the Eastern countries claimed permanent victory over the “inferior” capitalism, today the likes of Francis Fukuyama state an end of the history and it happens that Vatamanu and Florin manage to easily denounce both with their poster. The black-red Floor Drawing, which in its colors refers to the idea of anarchism is combined with the film Poem, that shows the production process of the aforementioned poster. 30 December 1926 features a cite from Walter Benjamins essay about his 1926 visit to Moscow where Benjamin tries to understand and describe the post-revolutionary situation in relation to the city.

Andrea Geyer

nothereadmin — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 17:55:31 +0000

Comrades of Time: Vanessa (Screenshot) – multi-channel video installation / 7 videos, HD, color, sound, 2010/2011

Comrades of Time: Anna (Jess) – multi-channel video installation / 7 videos, HD, color, sound, 2010/2011

Comrades of Time: Anya (Screenshot) – multi-channel video installation / 7 videos, HD, color, sound, 2010/2011

Comrades of Time: Anna (Screenshot) – multi-channel video installation / 7 videos, HD, color, sound, 2010/2011

Comrades of time follows certain traces of contemporary thought of the 1930s that the artist Andrea Geyer relates to the Weimar Republic of post-World War I Germany. On seven monitors we follow actors who perform thoughts, ideas and quotes of thinkers like Helene Stöcker, Rosa Luxemburg, Alfred Döblin, Elisabeth Sussmann, Walter Benjamin, Alice Salomon, Sigmund Freud, George Grosz. Andrea Geyer however uses a form of displacement (in a Brechtian sense) and re-settles the quotes directly in our time, with the actors addressing the spectator directly as “dear comrade” or “my friend”. A reconstructed Marcel Breuer table suggests a relation to Modernity and the common ground on which the performers act.

Marko Lulic

nothereadmin — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 08:07:18 +0000

Entertainment Center mies (red), 2004. Plexiglas, 200 x 400 x 160 cm. Sammlung DekaBank, Frankfurt/Main

Memorial for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Berlin-Lichtenberg, 1926, Architect: Mies van der Rohe

Mahnmal gegen den Mythos des ersten Opfers, 2008 (Monument against the Myth of the first Victim)

„99,73“ is a 3,20 m high steel sculpture, addressing the percentage of agreement to a referendum about Austrias annexation through Nazi-Germany on April 10, 1938. It argues against the myth, that the Austrian people were Hitlers first victims.

Hannes Meyer

nothereadmin — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 22:19:44 +0000

Federal School of the Confederation of German trade unions (1928–1930), aerial photo ca. 1930

Natja Catalan, Tibor Weiner, Philipp Tolziner, Konrad Püschel, Margarete Mengel, Lilya Polgar, Anton Urban – members of the “Hannes Meyer architectural group” in Moscow, mid-1930s

Documentation of the Birobidzhan city planning project in «СССР на стройке», 1933/1934

Laubenganghäuser, 5 buildings for workers built by the Spar- und Baugenossenschaft Dessau (Savings and Building Cooperative Dessau), 1929/1930

Working from 1927 at the Bauhaus Dessau and being director until 1930 Hannes Meyer fostered left-wing discourse at the Bauhaus. After his dismissal he went to the Soviet Union, where he worked in urban planning and architecture along a group of enthusiast migrants. The growing Stalinist pressure forces him to leave Moscow in 1936 and he manages to avoid the fate of his spouse Margarete Mengel (executed in 1938) and fellow migrants like Heinrich Vogeler. Mengel, Vogeler and many other German passport holders wer not able to leave the Soviet Union, since as communists they would have been immediately imprisoned/executed by the Nazis.

Anri Sala

nothereadmin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:17:58 +0000

Intervista (Interview), documentary, 1998, 26 min, PAL – screenshot

Anri Salas 1998 documentary Intervista tells the story of him finding a tape without sound, clearly depicting his mother next to the Albanian Communist Party chief Enver Hoxha at a youth convention. Afterwards his mother is talking in a TV interview, but the sound is absent. Sala now begins his research to find out what his mother said, turns to former party members and the TV station, without success, and ends up with a teacher of sign language who deciphers his mothers’ lips. Confronting her with what she has said originally, Anris mother goes through a full set of emotions from denial and shame to rationalization and regret.

Jan Stefan Kolbe

nothereadmin — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:42:58 +0000

Rot sind die Füchse (Red are the foxes). documentary, 90 min, Germany, 2011 (screenshot)

“Red are the foxes” is a documentary by Jan Stefan Kolbe about three protagonists whose parents are confident communists. When they were children Anne, Peter and Gabi were member of the “Red Foxes”, a youth group of the MLPD (Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany). The notion of Marxism-Leninism already makes us aware that the party has not broken with old doctrines and leans towards a very traditional understanding of communism. While their parents worked in jobs like teacher, lawyer or medic, their ideology foresaw a factory worker career for their children. The documentary follows the different paths of the protagonists, chosen by their parents, with some of them trying to avoid the track and others positively living it. To add perspective the documentary also tells the story of some of the current Red Foxes.

Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers

nothereadmin — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:58:51 +0000

Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 1932

Ruwim Lissitzky, El Lissitzky, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, Dziga Vertov, 1932

Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 1930

Those, known and famous in our Socialist Country, poster, 1938

As a close collaborator with her second husband El Lissitzky, Sophie Küppers-Lissitzkys role in art history is unfortunately less known. However she contributed significantly to his work through ideas and realizing numerous projects in Moscow, while El Lissitzky was elsewhere to cure his increasingly weak health. Before moving with El Lissitzky to Moscow in 1927, she was an early supporter of avantgarde artists along Paul Küppers (director of the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover). In 1944 she was deported as enemy foreigner to Novosibirsk, where she continued to live under difficult conditions. Her son Jen tries to restitute paintings (by Klee, Kandinsky a.o.), which she left in Germany when moving to the Soviet Union, and which were later sold to collectors and museums after being marked as Entartete Kunst in 1937 by the Nazis.

Holger Wüst

nothereadmin — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 19:27:56 +0000

Parkhaus Vaterland, photo montage, digital print on paper, 491 x 1230 cm, 2008

Parkhaus Vaterland. Ein Bild als Film. video, 136 min, 2009

Messianismus und historischer Materialismus, photo montage, digital print on paper, 500 x 2100 cm, 2009

Zekher (Part 2 – The Commodity of Labor), photo montage, digital print on paper, 500 x 2350 cm, 2010

Frankfurt based artist Holger Wüst‘s work is heavily influenced by critical theory in the broadest sense, demonstrated by references to Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno (to name the most obvious). His large scale digital print Zekher, for instance, addresses through its subtitle individual labor as commodity and relationship of constrain. “Individual labor is a commodity because it can be sold—given the condition that people are free to make decisions about their own labor. Nevertheless, the people who have no assets are those particularly forced to sell their labor.” (Antje Krause-Wahl). On a visual level Zekher adds even more references, such as the working contracts that the miners hold in their hands, which have been initially torn up and later pieced back again.

Nada Prlja

nothereadmin — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 23:43:45 +0000

Strike. installation (sewing machines, t-shirts, painted slogans), 2010

Nada Prlja‘s installation Strike consists of a line of industrial sewing machines standing frozen out-of-action, seemingly abandoned by its workforce as a protest against the conditions of labour today. This artistic strike resonates with the observation that work is so firmly at the epicentre of contemporary life that it is virtually impossible to find an alternative to the present-day system. The installation of a strike within the gallery space, invites action in order to alter the already long-established relationship between work, production of goods, wages, pension scheme, etc. In other words, it objects against the submissiveness, obedience and uniformity of citizens on which this system is fundamentally based. With the writings on the t-shirts ‘Black Communism’, Prlja is referencing to the ‘Black Wave’ cinema movement of the Yugoslav late 1960s, which was both an expression of freedom under socialism and, for the artist, represents “the creation of parallel production methods to the existing one – ‘Black wave’ symbolize communism with the possibility of self-criticism.”

Varvara Stepanova

nothereadmin — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:12:53 +0000

Pattern for a cloth. gouache on paper, 1924

Vavara Stepanova in one of her dresses. Appr. 1924/1925, photograph by Alexandr Rodchenko

Pattern for a cloth. gouache on paper, 1924

Christin Lahr

nothereadmin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:14:47 +0000

MACHT GESCHENKE: DAS KAPITAL – A Critique of Political Economy, Donation to the Federal Republic of Germany. Daily transfer of Capital to the Federal Ministry of Finance, 2009 – ca. 2052, hybrid media, screenshot of bank transfer Nr. 00815

MACHT GESCHENKE: DAS KAPITAL, notational system of counting marks and numerals. “OVER-SUBSCRIPTIONS” of Capital on translucent paper

MACHT GESCHENKE: THE MAKING OF CAPITAL, WORK IN PROGRESS, Ars Electronica, Cyberarts 2011, Offenes Kulturhaus, Linz, installation view. Takeover of the personal chair of Dr. Franz Dobusch, mayor of Linz

Since May 31, 2009, Christin Lahr has transferred 1 cent daily to the German Federal Ministry of Finance, thus helping to counter the growing mountain of debt in homeopathic doses. In the field »reason for payment«, she always writes 108 characters from “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy” by Karl Marx. In this way the entire book will be transferred into the state’s central account via online banking in the next 43 years. The value increase of the capital investment is not included, nor are the required labor and lifetime or the added value through cultural and symbolic capital calculated into this.
Each of the roughly 15.709 money transfers is documented per screenshot, printed, signed, and given away to individual citizens. At the same time, in “over-subscriptions” on translucent paper, the artist crosses out character by character and thus produces, analogously to the book, an unreadable notation of “CAPITAL”, consisting of counting marks and numerals.

Kostis Velonis

nothereadmin — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 07:03:49 +0000

Gaining socialism while losing your wife (after Popova’s set construction for “Le Cocu magnifique”, 1922), 17 m x 4.50 m x 92 cm, 2009

Reconstruction of the model of Vlamidir Tatlin’s monument to the Third International as an Instrument of research for Domesticity, 2009-10, 30 x 30 x 110cm, Wood, acrylic, veneer, plywood, paint spray

Portrait of Klucis in the Gulag Tower, 2010, 80 x 35 x 25 cm, Wood, veneer, acrylic

Kostis Velonis‘ work discusses the relation of communism as an utopia and modernism as an utopia, re-constructing and commenting on works of post-revolutionary Soviet and communist artists like Tatlin, Popowa, Klucis and many more, who at the same time developed a Modernist approach in the special Russian & Soviet context.

Esfir Shub

nothereadmin — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 19:27:21 +0000

Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, montage documentary, 1927

Esfir Shub like Dziga Vertov & Elizaveta Svilova developed a documentary montage film style using already existing documentary material from pre-revolutionary, tsarist times that she researched to be combined with new shots. The material was put in context through montage and inter-titles. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty was made in 1927 on occasion of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. Shub became a central figure of the Soviet documentary cinema, working at the Sovkino studios since 1926 and as film director at the Central Documentary Studio from 1942-1953. It is notable that she continued working through the Stalin years, adapting in style and content, while for instance her former collegues Vertov/Svilova where deprived of possibilites to work. Падение династии Романовых (Fall of the Romanov dynasty) on youtube.

Alfredo Jaar

nothereadmin — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 16:22:43 +0000

The Marx Lounge (2010), installation

Infinite Cell (2004) from the Gramsci Trilogy, installation

Alfred Jaars Infinite Cell refers to the cell(s) where Italian Marxist Antonia Gramsci was imprisoned for 6 years since 1926. During that time he wrote what is know today as the Prison Books and has deeply influenced current post-Marxist thinking (e.g. Negri, Bologna). In Jaars installation through a mirror the space of the cell becomes infinite from a certain view point. The 2010 Marx Lounge at the Liverpool Biennial is basically a collection of Marxian and leftist books presented in a lounge situation.

Jiri Skála

nothereadmin — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 19:37:31 +0000

Two Families of Objects, 2007. 14 color photographs, Lamda print, 50 x 40 cm, photographed by Jan Boublík, 2007 | Josef Malát had been employed as a technician at Škoda Klatovy from the early 1960s until 2003. In 2000, he purchased a multifunctional tool sharpener from the factory where he had worked for close to 40 years.

Two Families of Objects, 2007. 14 color photographs, Lamda print, 50 x 40 cm, photographed by Jiřina Skálová, 2006 | Jiřina Skálová had been employed as a lathe-hand at Škoda Klatovy from 1968 until 2006. In 2001, she and her husband Jaroslav Skála purchased the universal lathe on which she had worked for 22 years.

Two Families of Objects, 2007. 14 color photographs, Lamda print, 50 x 40 cm, photographed by: Jaroslav Stupka, 2007 | Jaroslav Stupka had been employed in the logistics section at Škoda Klatovy from the late 1970s until 1992. In 2006, he purchased a universal lathe from the factory where he had worked for close to 15 years.

Celechovsky/Mrazek. Confrontation Reading. 2009, HD video, 13 min.

Jiri Skalas installation Two families of Objects tells a story of the ownership of the means of production where his father buys an turning lathe from a now bankrupt former state owned company as a birthday gift for Skalas mother. Thus he wants to ensure the family income from working with this machinery. Jiri Skala then collects more photos of now individually owned machinery that has been bought by former colleagues of his parents.
In the video Celechovsky/Mrazek the artist Bohdan Mrazek reads the memoirs of Josef Celechovsky. Mrazek, a successful visual artist during socialist times, also was active in the Czech samizdat scene of the the 1970s. Celechovsky was a member of the communist party from early 1950s up until 1989.

t-shirtz.org

nothereadmin — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:26:19 +0000

No context without subtitles? The homage to a Chinese female worker on a t-shirt does not have to be agitprop while referring to agitprop.

As I have heard George Grosz once must have said (mutatis mutandis) that one could not go on and on with illustrating statistics if the situation was changed. Isotype may be a model for the pictogrammatical standardisation of numbers and proportions of human life (within capitalism), Gerd Arntz’ types though will no longer match if exploiters dress like lower classes and man and woman end to be hetero normalised beings for no reason.

Otto Neurath, the isotypical statistician, has been criticised by the International Communists for being a state communist who, together with Rudolf Hilferding, is projecting the capitalistic government and control over production into communism.

The World Factory obviously is a fact, which means, the planning coordination of production and consumption, under conditions of a bloody competition and overproduction of course, is what one calls currently “globalisation”. Question is, with or without Histomat, how its chaotic fields shall be changed communistically.

To build the ism is not schooling only. To be a marxist appears to be the dogmatic turn of a scientific and certainly missionary approach, connected to a name, for orientation towards a fetish of an identificational self-stylising. The label is worn willingly by Marxkillers.

The trained feminist sets his hand on the Critique of Political Economy for his companion.

This contribution by t-shirtz.org was specifically made to comment the nothere blog.

Philipp Paulsen

nothereadmin — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 22:20:49 +0000

Reconstruction of the German Museum of War Time Economy (Deutsches Kriegswirtschaftsmuseum Leipzig). Installation (metal construction, silk print on linoleum), 2011. Installation view at Kunstverein Leipzig.

Reconstruction of the German Museum of War Time Economy (Deutsches Kriegswirtschaftsmuseum Leipzig). Installation, detail. 2011

Reconstruction of the German Museum of War Time Economy (Deutsches Kriegswirtschaftsmuseum Leipzig). Picture postcard, re-print on yellow paper, 2011

Reconstruction of the German Museum of War Time Economy (Deutsches Kriegswirtschaftsmuseum Leipzig). Installation (metal construction, silk print on linoleum, paper brochures), 2011

Leipzig based graphic designer Philipp Paulsen has researched the little known German Museum of War Time Economy, developed by Otto Neurath and his team during the late First World War years. The museum however didn’t feature what you would expect with such a title – war machinery or similar objects – but turned to the individuals’ everyday economies of survival within a state directed war economy. It discussed the informal economies developed during war times and tried to keep information about these economies alive for future generations (but was closed soon). Since not much is left of the museum Paulsens reconstruction fills a gap in our knowledge about Otto Neuraths engagement preceeding the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 and the opening of the Social and Economic Museum (Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum) in Vienna 1925. The installation was developed for the Raum der Gegenwart exhibition at Kunstverein Leipzig.

Mica Basicevic Mangelos

nothereadmin — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:01:11 +0000

Energija, circa 1978, acrylic and oil on globe

Le Manifeste sur la Mort 1978, acrylic and oil on globe

Manifesto about energy no. 000,1977-78 acrylic on globe

A-Bomb Manifesto. Mixed Media, 1977-78

Bini Adamczak

nothereadmin — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:01:14 +0000

Gestern Morgen. Über die Einsamkeit kommunistischer Gespenster und die Rekonstruktion der Zukunft. (Yesterday Morning. On the communist spectres’ lonelyness and the reconstruction of future.) Unrast Verlag. Münster, 2007

Bini Adamczaks outstanding book is a serious attempt to criticise the Stalinist mode of communism in Soviet Russia from a perspective that is not anti-communist. The author starts out with the Hitler-Stalin-Pakt and follows anti-fascists and communists who became double victims of the Stalinist terror. It further digs into history until Lenins death in 1924 and even further discussing the events of Kronstadt in that sense, that Kronstadt was a proletarian, communist uprising against the Bolshevik party communism (to make a long story short). Through the revolutionary debris the author searches for another reincarnation of a communist desire, from a perspective that includes the Stalinist victims. Unfortunately it’s only available in German by now.

Lucia Nimcova

nothereadmin — Sat, 14 May 2011 19:40:26 +0000

Double Coding. 2010, installation view

Double Coding. 2010, video still

Double Coding is a visual research into censorship of cinema films in Slovakia during socialist times. The work by Lucia Nimcova addresses among other the challenge that artists faced often during that period – they should create “positive heroes” to provide orientation to the socialist masses. So it was a thin line to walk, between realism and being realistic or too realistic. They have to find a balance in the labyrinth of unwritten rules.

Paula Muhr

nothereadmin — Tue, 03 May 2011 16:26:26 +0000

Tito-Tata (Tito-Father), inkjet-prints and projection, 2008

Flipping through the photo-album of her father, a former director of the state-owned sweets factory in socialist Yugoslavia, artist Paula Muhr discovered gestures and actions resembling similar photos of the Yugoslav long-term president Josip Tito. Combining both she discovers underlying stereotypes of representation of the “dominant male figures” (Muhr).

Christoph Schäfer

nothereadmin — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 20:39:26 +0000

Auslaufendes Rot – Anti-Monument für die Rote Ruhr Armee (Fading Red – Anti Monument for the Red Ruhr Army), installation (flags on tower) 2010

Auslaufendes Rot – Anti-Monument für die Rote Ruhr Armee (Fading Red – Anti Monument for the Red Ruhr Army), installation (tram, poster prints with drawings) 2010, photo: Markus Ambach Projekte

Auslaufendes Rot – Anti-Monument für die Rote Ruhr Armee (Fading Red – Anti Monument for the Red Ruhr Army), drawing, 2010

Auslaufendes Rot – Anti-Monument für die Rote Ruhr Armee (Fading Red – Anti Monument for the Red Ruhr Army), tram inside, 2010

Christoph Schäfers installation retraces the 1920′s history of the the Red Ruhr Army to comment on the prevalent historization of these events, which according to Schäfer has been highly influenced by right-wing and conservative view points. He digs into a history of self-organized, syndicalist struggles, an attempt to organize a powerful socialist army in the Ruhr-Region to counter the anti-democratic, right-wing coup attempt called Kapp-Putsch in Berlin. The installation includes many different places, a water tower that became symbol of the struggles, a tram with 1920s slogans and a series of drawings on posters along a major road of the region.

Darko Fritz

nothereadmin — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 20:06:42 +0000

time=money=time=, inauguration of new tram line and regulation of tram traffic. Zagreb 2000

time=money=time=, text at LED displays in all trams in Zagreb, Zagreb 2000

On the 16th of June 2000 for one day only a new tram-line was inaugurated, endlessly circling around the square where the house of the Croatian Association of Artists is situated. The tram’s destination display read ‘time is money’ in both English and Croatian. The same text was read aloud and broadcast from the loudspeakers usually used for the tram announcements. There was only one station to board and alight from the tram and the ride was free. During June/July 2000 electronic (LED) displays in all trams operating in Zagreb carried one minute long time=money=time= message, alongside other messages and advertising. Darko Fritz’s action has been realized at the opening of the exhibition What, Who & for Whom, on the occasion of 153rd anniversary of Communist Manifesto at 16th June 2000 in Zagreb.

Robert Burghardt

nothereadmin — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 18:30:57 +0000

Monument for Modernism, Berlin 2009 (Model)

Monument for Modernism, Berlin 2009 (Montage)

Monument for Modernism, Berlin 2009 (Montage, view from Unter den Linden street)

With his truly monumental Monument for the Modernism Robert Burghardt aims to intervene into an ongoing discussion about urban space in Berlin. Parts of the former Berlin City Palace that were destroyed during WWII were replaced by modernist buildings in East Germany, but the Palace of Republic and the Foreign Ministry were again torn down following the GDR’s end, leaving an urban void in Berlins center. Contrary to the ongoing discussion that favours rebuilding the original City Palace, Burghardt proposes a collage of existing modernist architecture that at the first instance is dysfunctional, but opens up space for individual or collective purposes and imagination.

Yevgeniy Fiks

nothereadmin — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 18:23:57 +0000

Communist Tour of Moma, Performance, New York 2010

Communist Tour of Moma, Lecture/Poster, New York 2010

Communist Guide to New York, Book, New York 2007

New York based artist Yevgeniy Fiks describes his intentions: “My work is inspired by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which led me to the realization of the necessity to reexamine the Soviet experience in the context of the history of the Left, including that of the international Communist movement. My work is a reaction to the collective amnesia within the post-Soviet space over the last decade, on the one hand, and the repression of the histories of the American Left in the US, on the other.” As for the first part, this is mostly what this blog is potentially about, so I’m happy to present his work here.

Birgit Schlieps

nothereadmin — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 11:02:42 +0000

1/3 Archiv Volk & Welt, 2007, digital prints, two-part collage, each 50 x 35 cm, installation view in the former GDR-Restaurant »Aktivist« on the occasion of the exhibition Kongress der Futurologen in Eisenhüttenstadt 2007

Kulturpalast, 2003/2007, still picture, digital print wallpapered, (5,98 x 3,80 m) & Rohmodelle, 2003/2005, analog prints framed 15 (15,1 x 21,9 cm) and 7 (20,2 x 30,3 cm), installation view, Berlin 2007

Bassin, 2005/2007, digital print, (130x110cm) from the series Trancemoderne

Tiffany, 2005/2007, digital print, (130x110cm) from the series Trancemoderne

Berlin based urban sculptor, photographer and author Birgit Schlieps deals in her work 1/3 Archiv Volk & Welt with the archive of the Volk & Welt (nation & world) publishing house, which published Soviet and anti-fascist ﬁction and later also international contemporary ﬁction, translated into German for the GDR audience. Volk & Welt was founded in 1947 and ﬁnished its publishing activities in 2001. The two part collage is made from 1/3 of the actual archive based in the museum of everyday culture of the GDR in Eisenhüttenstadt, featuring the book spines like a geological cross section through the archive.

The installation Trancemoderne deals with the city Aktau that was founded in 1963 as a Soviet modernist model city, drawing people for its nuclear and oil industries from all over the USSR. Now situated in Kazakhstan its inhabitants have to adapt to capitalist relations of production and living adding another architectonic, visual layer to the city.

Elisabeth Smolarz

nothereadmin — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:31:02 +0000

Farewell East Germany, Videoinstallation, 2010, screenshot

Farewell East Germany, Videoinstallation, 2010, installation view

The protagonists of the three channel video installation by Elisabeth Smolarz were asked to act out tasks which were imposed by the German Democratic Republic on all of it’s citizens until the fall of the Berlin Wall. After blind folding himself Peter S. assembles and disassembles an AK-47 rifle–a skill he learned during his military service in the National Peoples Army (the East German military). The center video shows a room, where Hans Dietrich Genscher and Eduard Shevardnadze secretly met in New York in 1989 to discuss re-unification of East and West Germany. In the third segment Uwe. B performs all Russian-language songs that he learned in school–most of them propaganda songs to encourage loyalty to the Soviet Union.

Alexander A. Deineka

nothereadmin — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 14:03:10 +0000

Demonstration. Ink, pen, brush on paper, 1928. State Tretyakov Gallery Moscow

Textile Worker. Oil on canvas, 1927, State Russian Gallery, St. Petersburg

Bomb Carrier. Oil on canvas. 1932. Astrakhan State Gallery

Stakhanov Workers. Oil on canvas, 1937. State Gallery of Perm

Left march. Oil on canvas, 1941. Literature Museum, Moscow

Defence of Sevastopol. Oil on canvas, 1942, State Russian Museum St Peterburg.

Igor Grubic

nothereadmin — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 21:21:24 +0000

Scarves and Monuments. Action in public space (2008), from the series 366 Rituala Oslobađanja (366 Liberation Rituals)

Christmas Trees. Action in public space (2009), from the series 366 Rituala Oslobađanja (366 Liberation Rituals)

Igor Grubics work is often described as rooted in direct action, often acted out anonymously and made available through documentation afterwards. Here two works were selected from a much broader body, referring quite straight to issues like anti-fascism and how it is interpreted or ignored nowadays.