Vyacheslav Akhunov, Ayreen Anastas + René Gabri, Babi Badalov, Chto Delat, Cristina David, Patricia Esquivias, Pedro G. Romero / Archivo F.X., Nicoline van Harskamp, Sharon Hayes, Sanja Ivekovic, Peggy Meinfelder, Ivan Moudov, Ciprian Muresan, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, María Ruido, SASA [44] + MeeNa Park, Wisnu Suryapratama, Taller Popular de Serigrafía, Vangelis Vlahos, Haegue Yang.
February 12th - May 2nd, 2010

The exhibition presents the outcome of more than two years of researching “social transformation“ in the countries that underwent a transformation from the totalitarian regimes. It is conceived as an imaginative and analytical space that – with a certain distance – enables the visitor to see and reflect the processes of change that started by the fall of the Iron Curtain (1989) in Eastern Europe, Student demonstrations in Indeonesia in 1998 or Revolution in South Korea (1987) and have to an extent continued until the present. The way this topic is approached is influenced by a feeling of affiliation to these changes which are in a way co-formed by us and whose impact affects and influences us. It is therefore an attempt to look at “transformation” as at a “lived out” and gradually receding process.

The curators do not believe that art can provide any direct and easily applicable answers to political and social problems and conflicts. Art does however create a space which provides the basic pre-requisites on which thinking, dreaming and discussions about politics and society are based.

Thinking about transformation is conceived as structured in tension between various methods of social sciences and artistic practice. The experience of transformation in “Eastern Europe” is an independent theoretical field. In the context of transformation studies, the so-called Eastern European region has its own specifics that originated in the geo-political division of the world, irrevocably decided at the Jalta conference as a consequence of the Second World War. The power division of the world into East and West can no longer be mechanically adopted without reservation – it cannot be used when trying to understand the processes of cultural signifying, cultural production and representation in that region. If one automatically accepts such a division, one assumes that those geo-political power polarities are recognizable in the “cultural material” – which means that cultural production is not viewed a priori, as creation, as a polluting semiosis, but as a mere representative of the recognizability of the East-West power polarity.

While researching transformation processes, we abandoned the reductive theories of the region that we come from and that we represent. We extended research to artistic and theoretical outputs that reflect the transformations in Greece, Spain, South Korea, Romania, Serbia, Indonesia and Argentina. The attempt to newly formulate trans-local specifics of transformation meant to abandon the stigmatic construction of so-called “Eastern Europe” and opt for a differentiated, authoritative and new map of the world of transformation.