Eastern European Art and Memory

Eastern European Art and Memory

By Denise Carvalho

There are many kinds of isolation. There is the isolation of not knowing, of uncertainty, of not being able to speak, of illiteracy, or of not knowing what to say. It is ironic that in the height of social media, the role of communications, once able to ignite meaning into action, now has been crushed down to the lowest rank of administration. Once the soul of the poet inspired by muses, communication has now become a systemic, rigid, stolid tool for the stratagem of corporate techno-businesses, completely expunging semantics into techno-business jargons. 

The most outrageous form of isolation for a writer is the lack of readers who can understand the words.

However, the question remains. Why does one write? I write so I can finally know myself. Or I write so I don’t forget. Or I write so I can finally express what I didn’t have the guts to say. 

There is one thing that one never forgets: the truth to a war; a truth that stays like the scar of an injure, always reminding its victims of the event. 

I was never in Ukraine, but have been in Poland several times. I was also in the Czech Republic, and these two countries spoke to me in ways I never understood. I felt a deep connection with them. Although the situation in Poland is now unsure, as rightwing nationalists infiltrate power positions of government, seeing thousands of Ukrainians taking asylum in Poland still makes me breathe with some hope. The reason is that during three decades that I visited Poland, always to collaborate as a curator creating partnerships with their supportive art professionals, what I learned about them was that they have integrity. For almost thirty years, I partnered my reactive ideas in exhibitions in Poland and the Czech Republic, always feeling at home. Perhaps the only connection that I had with them was that I also grew up in a dictatorship in my native Brazil (1964-1985), before coming to live in the US and spending my last thirty seven years, mostly in NYC. 

I am proud to say that I curated two big exhibitions in New York focusing on artists from Eastern Europe, and a third exhibition of mostly women artists from Eastern Europe in Brazil. In one of these shows, entitled Minimal Differences, I had the privilege to include at least one important group of artists from Ukraine. Here is a quote from the catalogue. “R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space), the Ukrainian art collective, was formed in 2004 during the Orange Revolution. Initially a laboratory of 20 artists in residence at the Centre for Contemporary Art at the NaUKMA in Kiev, they began concentrating their collective projects amongst six artists in 2006. … Their piece Patriotism (initiated in 2006) is an alphabet of sigs that, like Esperanto, is intended as a universal language. Their vocabulary is an aggregate of a variety of graphic symbols, clearly interfering with media strategies, while creating humorous and subversive messages. By combining different logotypes, their messages can become ambiguously ironic, expanding national clichés across borders. Although they use a technique that harkens back to the age of Soviet propaganda, R.E.P.’s intention is experimental rather than ideological, carrying multiple meanings, that way subverting clichés, and redefining the cultural language systems. Their vocabulary of signs is organic and connected to everyday actions and situations, directly resulting from the group’s political manifestations in the streets, and at Kiev market. Using slogans such as ‘Spirituality for everyone’ or ‘Everyone is an artist’, they reference Joseph Beuys’s famous slogan, thereby emphasizing their own beyond-utopia message, becoming a more interactive and imaginative dialogue with language.” (Denise Carvalho, excerpt from the catalogue of the exhibition Minimal Differences, curated in 2010 at White Box Gallery in NYC). 

It is ironic to rediscover this catalogue from more than a decade ago, with works by numerous Eastern European artists conveying their memories about the Communist past, ever unsure whether this threat was still roaming their countries’ borders. In fact, this catalogue has several hints of how the threat from potential oppressive regimes was still possible.

It would be fantastic to have this exhibition now reshown in a major museum. However, I know this is almost impossible, as the world has become more and more a corporate diorama, a variety show with a few compelling and thoughtful artworks which stir in the vortex of the overall spectacle.