Post Soviet Visions. Personal vs political, the new Eastern Europe on show

Life after communism. Photo exhibition in London tells life in East Europe, where people deal with personal rather than the political issues.

Dime Komarov, Sasha Liza

Post-Soviet Visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe is a group show of photography exploring new visual representations of lifestyle and landscape in Eastern Europe. The exhibition gathers the work of a young generation of artist’s photos after the end of Communism. And it takes place at a time when the term ‘post-Soviet’ has become a byword for bold, innovative creativity in cultural fields from high fashion to film. Photographers in Post-Soviet Visions come from Georgia, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Although the personal circumstances of the photographers born in Eastern Europe differ, they share a common past with either they, or their parents, growing up in countries that once existed under Communist rule. Today, they live within the globally connected modern world where borders of East and West are erased by new technologies. But the physical traces of the past can be seen in work such as Jędrzej Franek’s dizzying shots of Polish tower blocks and Michal Korta’s striking black and white images of Brutalist buildings in Skopje, Macedonia. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 and the end of its influence over its satellite states, the countries of the former Eastern Bloc have each forged their own paths. In artworks such as Hassan Kurbanbaev’s portraits of teenagers in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and David Meskhi’s photos of skater kids in Georgia, Post-Soviet Visions captures the new identities emerging across the region. Instead of old binaries of East vs West, socialist vs capitalist, their images capture a generation shaped by issues that are personal rather than the political; by questions of sexuality, gender and style. 

Title:
Post-Soviet visions: image and identity in the new Eastern Europe
Museum :
Calvert 22 Foundation
Opening dates:
23 February-15 April 2018
Curators:
Ekow Eshun, Anastasia Fedorova.
Address:
22 Calvert Avenue, London, UK, E2 7JP

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