Never the Twain Shall Meet

The Bawag Foundation in Vienna is putting on a show until the middle of June of 12 artists from Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, Prague, and Vienna, intended to define what art and culture is about within the context of an ”enlarging” or ”integrating” Europe. The show, titled Free Entrance, follows on a history of ”East” shows that have typically provided one interpretation of this rich and complicated area, and thus have contributed to supporting an attitude regarding Eastern Europe as an exotic sphere. The show questions this notion.

Iara Boubnova, founding director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia says, ”The participation of Eastern European artists in major international exhibitions met with attention and recognition and made us hope that the art from our world might become an integral part of the ‘social contract,’ as it did in the societies of the West. Yet, it gradually turned out that the smoothly working mechanisms of geopolitical fashions have only granted us the right to make our appearance as local exotic creatures — a form of contact restricted to the necessary minimum of civilized cultural exchange.”

Free Entrance presents positions of the 1970s and of today and does not focus explicitly on ”politically involved” art — all the works presented deal with the complex and contradictory realities on the contemporary world. Look for interesting videos and photographs by Valie Export, the group OHO from Slovenia, and an installation dealing with Hungarian avant-garde art, the Tragbare I2 Museum. Czech artists include Krištof Kintera and Jiří Kovanda; and from Slovakia Roman Ondák, Pavlína Fichta Čierna and Július Koller.

01.01.2004