Ksenia Nouril

Artists in the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: either join the official academies and make art that conformed to the state’s aesthetic and ideological dictates, or attempt to develop alternative artistic practices and spheres for exhibiting their work. In the early 1970s, conceptual artists Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov chose the latter option, turning their limited resources into an asset by pioneering an entirely new artistic genre: the album. Somewhere between drawings and novels, Kabakov and Pivovarov’s albums were also the basis for unique performance pieces, as the artists invited select audiences to their Moscow apartments for private readings and viewings of the albums, helping to cultivate an alternative artistic community in the process. This exhibition catalog brings together Kabakov and Pivovarov’s key works for the first time, putting the two artists in dialogue and recreating their artistic community. It not only includes nearly hundred pages of full-color illustrations, but also provides complete English translations of the Russian texts that appear in the volume, plus new interviews with each artist. Taken together, they give viewers a new appreciation of the different aesthetic strategies each artist used to depict the absurdities of everyday life in the Soviet era. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.

Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov, Stories about Ourselves

Dialogues

Roxana Marcoci

Ana Janevski

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the ripple effects felt over the following years from Bucharest to Prague to Moscow demarcate a significant moment when artists were able to publicly reassess their histories and question the opposition between the former East and the former West. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe takes the pivotal political changes between 1989 and 1991 as its departure point to reflect on the effects that communism's disintegration across Central and Eastern Europe--including the Soviet Union's fifteen republics--had on the art practices, criticism, and cultural production of the following decades. This book presents a selection of the period's key voices that have introduced recent critical perspectives. Particular attention is given to the research and viewpoints of a new generation of artists, scholars, and curators who have advanced fresh critical perspectives and who are rewriting their own histories. Their examination of artistic practices and systems of cultural production proposes distinct outlooks for acting in the contemporary world while simultaneously rethinking the significance of the socialist legacy on art today. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe is an indispensable volume on modern and contemporary art and theory from the region. Contributors. Claire Bishop, Boris Buden, Keti Chukhrov, Kim Conaty, Michelle Elligott, Meghan Forbes, Boris Groys, Jon Hendricks, Sanja Iveković, IRWIN (Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik), Ana Janevski, David Joselit, Klara Kemp-Welch, Juliet Kinchin, Zofia Kulik, Katalin Ladik, Roxana Marcoci, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Ksenia Nouril, Dan Perjovschi, Natasa Petresin-Bachelez, David Platzker, Paulina Pobocha, Christian Rattemeyer, David Senior, Tamás St.Auby, Hito Steyerl, Dimtry Vilensky, Artur Żmijewski

Ksenia Nouril

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