"Ostalgia" opens today at the New Museum

The New Museum on New York City's Lower East Side presents "Ostalgia", an exhibition with works of more than fifty artists from twenty countries across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics.

From the Press release:

"Contesting the format of a conventional geographical survey,

the exhibition will include works produced by Western

European artists who have depicted the reality and the myth

of the East.

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. Twenty years ago, a process of dissolution

began, leading to the break-up of the Soviet Union and of

many other countries that had been united under communist

governments. From the Baltic republics to the Balkans, from

Central Europe to Central Asia, entire regions and nations

were reconfigured, their constitutions rewritten, their borders

redrawn. “Ostalgia” looks at the art produced in and about

some of these countries, many of which did not formally exist

two decades ago.

Mixing private confessions and collective traumas, the exhibition

traces a psychological landscape in which individuals and entire

societies negotiate new relationships to history, geography, and ideology."

Hermann Glockner, Beam-Tree, 1970.

Phil Collins, Marxism Today 2010

Sergey Zarva, Untitled, “Ogonyok” series, 2001

"Ostalgia" will be on view at the New Museum from July 14th through September 25th 2011

The exhibition is curated by Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions Massimiliano Gioni.

New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
212.219.1222