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16. 11. 09. - 16:00

Review: 'Gender Check' at MUMOK

By Samantha Cox

"Gender Check", a major new exhibition documenting representations of gender in Eastern European Art, opened this weekend at MUMOK in Vienna.

The exhibition, organised by Erste Foundation to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, aims to demonstrate the intricate connections art has to social and historical context. In particular, says Christine Böhler – director of the Foundation’s Culture Programme - the organisers wanted to demonstrate that ‘global challenges’ facing the world today, such as ‘climate change, political conflicts, the poverty trap and the economic crisis’, should not be discussed without reference to gender, and vice versa.

It is a worthy aim, and "Gender Check" is certainly an ambitious project, bringing together art created over a period of fifty years in twenty four countries. Regions are tied as much by politics as by geography, with work coming from countries as far west as Germany and as far apart as Estonia and Bulgaria. The exhibition is organised according to themes rather than nationality or time period and spans a massive four floors.

This huge scope means that "Gender Check" provides an unusual opportunity to get a taste of the wealth of art that has come out of Eastern Europe in the last fifty years and get a sense of where the art scene stands today. That many of the featured artists continue to live and work in their native countries underlines how much the exhibition and its researchers have their finger on the pulse of contemporary Eastern European art.

The first floor of the exhibition engages mostly with socialist gender models, both verifying and challenging established understandings of conceptions of gender in the period. The images are varied; there are striking contrasts between different propaganda images, some of which position women as strong, stocky participants in the construction of the Soviet state (often figured metaphorically as architecture), while others present woman as mother and provider of food -  an image a little closer to the western stereotype. Together, these different works ably demonstrate the different ways in which propaganda and art can appropriate the female form for a political cause.

Later on in the exhibition, there are some interesting pieces from the 1970s and ‘80s. Many of these deal with themes, such as identity, performance and the body, that will be quite familiar to those already acquainted with feminist art, but they are nonetheless worth seeing for their often tender and intimate explorations of the artist’s personal space and identity.

Most interesting, however, is work from the last two decades, a period which has offered more freedom - and new challenges - to artists as formerly communist countries negotiate their place in the world. Some pieces particularly worth seeing include work by Polish artist Katarzyna Górna, and Tanja Ostojić’s  fascinating recent work ‘Searching for a Husband with an EU passport’, which confronts contemporary understandings of immigration and the relationship between East and West in a humorous yet surprisingly tender way.

There are many other fascinating works at the exhibition in a variety of media, from sculpture to video; in fact, it is striking how much the work varies, from the politics expressed to the media used. What this suggests, perhaps, is that "gender" and "Eastern Europe" are simply not specific enough terms to hold together such a wide array of works.

Unfortunately, this variety, while eye-opening, ultimately blurs and confuses the message the exhibition is trying to put across. There are so many different processes at work here, so many questions raised and so many different representations of gender that the exhibition lacks a coherent narrative to hold the different works together. Although it may well be the case that the works on display hold a complex relation to their socio-political context, for the most part it is difficult to begin deciphering what this is.

This means that many of the interesting questions raised by the exhibition are left unexplored. To give just one example, although the conception of gender as a kind of performance has been discussed a great deal in gender studies, the abundance of this type of art at the exhibition – documented in photographs of the original performances – as well as the success of eastern European female performance artists such as the Serbian Marina Abramović, suggests that there is an intricate connection between this mode of expression and the particular freedoms available to, or denied, Eastern European women before the fall of communism.  Yet what this connection is or could be remains unexplored. A smaller exhibition with a tighter focus would have had the opportunity to do so.

The exhibition is at its most interesting when it tackles subjects insufficiently dealt with in art or cultural scholarship so far. The work in the exhibition that confronts masculinity – such as Croatian artist Sven Stilinović’s soft focus, romantic photos of reclined male nudes – is challenging and confrontational and suggests the impact that this kind of work could have on the art world and gender studies. Yet, once again, the question of exactly how these masculine gender identities relate to eastern European history and politics is not answered and the exhibition swiftly moves on to another theme.

The works on display at "Gender Check" are very worth seeing together while it is possible to do so, and the exhibition takes the important step of foregrounding gender in discussion around Eastern European art. It is a shame that the far-reaching ambition of this exhibition means that the organisers’ aims to demonstrate the complex connections between art, gender and the socio-political are not quite realised.

"Gender Check" runs until 14 February 2010.  For more information, see www.mumok.at

Austrian Times

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