The new Ostalgia exhibit at the New Museum in New York is focused on art from Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union. The exhibition takes its title from the German word ostalgie, a term that emerged in the 1990s to describe a sense of longing and nostalgia for the era before the collapse of the Communist Bloc.
More than 50 artists from 20 Warsaw Pact countries are represented in the exhibit with reportages on life and art then and now.
The exhibit, which runs until September 25, mixes “private confessions and collective traumas” and “traces a psychological landscape in which individuals and entire societies negotiate new relationships to history, geography, and ideology,” organizers said.
A mix of every imaginable media is used, ranging from paintings and photographs to installations.
Photographs by Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov depict the economic and also moral devastation of people left homeless and without medical help after the Soviet collapse.
One of the artists, Germany’s Thomas Schutte, said his sculpture of three ghoulish figures wrapped in cloaks, named “Three Capacity Men,” is a “representation of the past’s lingering ghosts.”
“Rather than fading or diminishing, these ghosts seem to have grown larger and more powerful,” he said.
Ostalgia
July 6, 2011 – September 25, 2011
Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Lobby Floor
New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
212.219.1222
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