Vernissage in Bucharest

Opening:
22 Dec 2008, 12:00

Venue:
Muzeul Naţional de Artă Contemporană,
Galeria Etaj 3/4, Teatrul Naţional Bucureşti,
Bd. N Bălcescu nr. 2

22 Dec 2008 – 18 Jan 2009
Thursday-Sunday 10am -6pm
Admission free

“The Romanian dream in its very raw shape”

For Vlad Nancă the House of the People in Bucharest, Ceauşescu’s former palace, is a building that represents the trauma of an entire population. So he, a child of the 1989 Central Eastern European revolutions, proposed to add some cupolas and crosses to it in order to turn it into the cathedral of national redemption a lot of people apparently crave for in contemporary Romania.

Vlad would have liked to see the feeling grow that the palace, which was build on the blood and tears of so many of his compatriots, is symbolically given back to the people. Albeit decisions were taken in a different way, Vlad never tires to think about and voice new cultural expression in public space. Find out about his art, which he creates in recurrent personal trips to the past.

Watch
Part 1 and Part 2 of the interview by Barbara Lubich.

Learn
how project artists discuss the exhibition in Bucharest.

See
the report of the project visit to Bucharest in December 2007.

OVERcoming DICTatorships in Cracow

Opening:
24 November at 12:00

Gallery U Frycza
Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Kraków University College (KSW),
ul. Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego 1, Building B
PL-30-705 Cracow

24 Nov - 14 Dec 2008
Weekdays 8am -9 pm, weekends 8am-8pm
Admission free.
Information on previous exhibitions.

After having presented a selection of its literary and artist approaches to the heritage of totalitarian dictatorships already in November 2007 Overcoming Dictatorships now returns with its exhibition to Cracow. This is not the only representation of the project's artists in Poland: Sándor Pinczehelyi (Pécs) took part in Mediations Biennale 2008, the first international bi-annual contemporary art exhibition in Poznań.

It seems a happy coincidence that the patron of our Polish partner university - Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (1503-1572), a Polish gentryman and theologian of reformatory and ecumenical orientations - also took part in the Council of Trent, where our project was hosted in May 2008 (see the report). Founded in 2000, KSW offers its students an interdisciplinary approach of economics, languages and culture based on diverse international cooperation in order to prepare them for the modern challenges posed by the processes of globalisation.

Contact Agata Krawiec for more information.

“I was attracted by the pictures you would never find in the press"

It not only seems to be a landmark of Berlin, Germany and even Europe, but also a signifier of human lives: the Brandenburg Gate. Photographer Harald Hauswald has been attracted by it from an early stage on, and has now also centred his contribution to the OVERcoming DICTatorships exhibition on it. “At school we had compulsory civics, what the people called “Red Light Radiotherapy”. Once I asked our teacher about a famous photo, taken during the time when the wall was being built. I wanted to know why the Combat Groups of the Working Class at Brandenburg Gate turned their backs on the West. I could not understand why they were aiming their guns towards the East. Officially they were supposed to protect us against the class enemy. But if this had been true, they would have been facing the other way. How come they were presenting their backsides to the class enemy?”

For him Photography was a way to virtually escape from the feeling of confinement which terrified him in the German Democratic Republic. He used it as an opportunity to fully develop his personality and skills in spite of and against the off-the-shelf lifestyle imposed by real socialist authorities. That is why in 1989 he saw himself much better prepared for the tough sides of capitalist dog-eat-dog society than a considerable number of East Germans who had actually enjoyed and accepted the regime’s general policy of directing people through life and who only resented its specific impotence to live up to its pretensions. From the late 1970s onwards Hauswald had opened his eyes and lenses to the back side of the East German capital’s social reality of “people rooting in rubbish bins, and punks and hooligans” which was consciously underexposed in the official media.

Harald Hauswald, who currently has two exhibtions on the myth of Eastern Europe and football hooligans on display in Berlin, was interviewed by Barbara Lubich on his personal way through real socialism and beyond. Learn about an exciting drift of a young tramp yearning for Led Zeppelin, catapulted by love from the provinces to the capital and opposing the system just by his desire to live. Click here to see the video.

Exhibition programme in Birmingham

Lunchtime Lecture Series

Tuesday 28 October, Aston Webb Rotunda, 1-2pm

Hannah Arendt: Politics and ‘Dark Times’
Dr Steve Buckler- Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham

The lecture will examine the work of the German political theorist Hannah Arendt who made an influential contribution to the study of totalitarianism and who developed a distinctive conception of politics that was intended as a response to the vulnerability to oppression that we experience in ‘dark times’.

Click here to get information on the Series.

Film Screenings

Wednesday 29.10.08, The Rainbow, 160 High Street,
Digbeth, 7 pm

La Vita è bella, (Life is Beautiful) Italy 1999

Winner of three academy awards Best Actor, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Dramatic Score. A moving and poignant tale of one father's sacrifice to save not just his young son's life but his innocence. This is the story of a Jewish Italian, Guido Orefice who comes to the Tuscan town of Arezzo in 1939. He falls in love with Dora, a beautiful young schoolteacher and a fairytale romance ensues. Several years later the occasional bigotries Guido once ignored have become Racial Laws. Throughout it all, he determines to shield his son from the brutal reality governing their lives.

This determination becomes a matter of life and death when Guido and his son are sent to a concentration camp three months before the war’s end. Of her own accord Dora deports herself on the same train. Now, in this unimaginable world, Guido must use his bold imagination and every ounce of his indefatigable spirit to save those he loves.

See the full programme here.