Joanne Richardson

In Transit. Video, 30 min., 2008 – screenshot

Letter from Moldova, video, 28 min, 2009 – screenshot

Red Tours. video, in collaboration with David Rych, 48 min, 2010 – screenshot

Red Tours. video, in collaboration with David Rych, 48 min, 2010 – screenshot

Joanne Richardsons video trilogy consisting of the works In Transit (2008), Letter from Moldova (2009) and Red Tours (2010) addresses aspects of the dissolving of the communist idea in former communist countries. Richardson looks into and researches, how it is possible to not simply repeat the current narrative about the communist past. ”Postcommunism is not a new stage of history, it is a continuation of the cold war. In a similar way, it demands a categorical rejection of communism, a purely emotional condemnation, without analysis, without reflection. What has changed is that the West’s clichés about the Eastern bloc are now internalized by the other side, taking the place of remembering.”

Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor

Long live and thrive Capitalism! installation view, Secession, Vienna, 2009

Floor Drawing, installation, 2009 and Poem, 7 min, film, super 8, 2009

Poem, 7 min, film, super 8, 2009

30 December 1926, installation, 2009

In their installation Long live an thrive capitalism! artists Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor refer to the propaganda posters that every ex-Communist-country-citizen does instantly recognize. While Communism/Socialism in the Eastern countries claimed permanent victory over the “inferior” capitalism, today the likes of Francis Fukuyama state an end of the history and it happens that Vatamanu and Florin manage to easily denounce both with their poster. The black-red Floor Drawing, which in its colors refers to the idea of anarchism is combined with the film Poem, that shows the production process of the aforementioned poster. 30 December 1926 features a cite from Walter Benjamins essay about his 1926 visit to Moscow where Benjamin tries to understand and describe the post-revolutionary situation in relation to the city.

Andrea Geyer

Comrades of Time: Vanessa (Screenshot) – multi-channel video installation / 7 videos, HD, color, sound, 2010/2011

Comrades of Time: Anna (Jess) – multi-channel video installation / 7 videos, HD, color, sound, 2010/2011

Comrades of Time: Anya (Screenshot) – multi-channel video installation / 7 videos, HD, color, sound, 2010/2011

Comrades of Time: Anna (Screenshot) – multi-channel video installation / 7 videos, HD, color, sound, 2010/2011

Comrades of time follows certain traces of contemporary thought of the 1930s that the artist Andrea Geyer relates to the Weimar Republic of post-World War I Germany. On seven monitors we follow actors who perform thoughts, ideas and quotes of thinkers like Helene Stöcker, Rosa Luxemburg, Alfred Döblin, Elisabeth Sussmann, Walter Benjamin, Alice Salomon, Sigmund Freud, George Grosz. Andrea Geyer however uses a form of displacement (in a Brechtian sense) and re-settles the quotes directly in our time, with the actors addressing the spectator directly as “dear comrade” or “my friend”. A reconstructed Marcel Breuer table suggests a relation to Modernity and the common ground on which the performers act.

Marko Lulic

Entertainment Center mies (red), 2004. Plexiglas, 200 x 400 x 160 cm. Sammlung DekaBank, Frankfurt/Main

Memorial for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Berlin-Lichtenberg, 1926, Architect: Mies van der Rohe

Mahnmal gegen den Mythos des ersten Opfers, 2008 (Monument against the Myth of the first Victim)

„99,73“ is a 3,20 m high steel sculpture, addressing the percentage of agreement to a referendum about Austrias annexation through Nazi-Germany on April 10, 1938. It argues against the myth, that the Austrian people were Hitlers first victims.

Hannes Meyer

Federal School of the Confederation of German trade unions (1928–1930), aerial photo ca. 1930
 

Natja Catalan, Tibor Weiner, Philipp Tolziner, Konrad Püschel, Margarete Mengel, Lilya Polgar, Anton Urban – members of the “Hannes Meyer architectural group” in Moscow, mid-1930s

Documentation of the Birobidzhan city planning project in «СССР на стройке», 1933/1934

Laubenganghäuser, 5 buildings for workers built by the Spar- und Baugenossenschaft Dessau (Savings and Building Cooperative Dessau), 1929/1930

Working from 1927 at the Bauhaus Dessau and being director until 1930 Hannes Meyer fostered left-wing discourse at the Bauhaus. After his dismissal he went to the Soviet Union, where he worked in urban planning and architecture along a group of enthusiast migrants. The growing Stalinist pressure forces him to leave Moscow in 1936 and he manages to avoid the fate of his spouse Margarete Mengel (executed in 1938) and fellow migrants like Heinrich Vogeler. Mengel, Vogeler and many other German passport holders wer not able to leave the Soviet Union, since as communists they would have been immediately imprisoned/executed by the Nazis.