Current
Political power relations, economic structures, and cultural ideas impact the way we experience, envision, and structure our environment. The Cold War, with its strict division between ‘East’ and ‘West’ both in physical and ideological terms, is a case in point. To a certain extent, Cold War history can be read as a history of spatial relations. This exhibition explores the spatial characteristics of Cold War era Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in ten sections: public space; private space; work space; border space; secret space; ideological space; alternative space; outer space; shared space; and changing space.
“Vessel of Change” is a video installation by artist and filmmaker Bill Ferehawk, who also edited The Wende Museum documentary “Collecting Fragments”, and multimedia designer David Hartwell. Ferehawk and Hartwell developed their video for the museum, which playfully reinterprets the Malta Summit of December 1989 between Presidents George Bush Sr. and Mikhail Gorbachev, symbolically sealing the end of the Cold War. The summit took place on a ship in wild waters in front of the harbor of Marsaxlokk. In this case, the museum becomes the ship that metaphorically anchors the end of the Cold War in Los Angeles.
Photography exhibition by Nathan Farb, based on a trip he took in 1977 to Novosibirsk as a host of the American exhibition Photography USA, part of a cultural exchange program under President Carter’s administration.
The Wende Museum and the Getty Research Institute (GRI) are combining their rich and complementary Hungarian collections to convey the story of Hungary’s visual culture between the 1956 uprising in Budapest and the end of the regime in 1989.
For the past ten years, British cultural historian Juliane Fürst has researched a topic that has never been consistently addressed before; the history and culture of Soviet hippies in the 1970s and 1980s. Hippies represented the most widespread and pervasive counter-culture in the Soviet Union. Maintaining an elaborate network between regional centers, they experimented with alternative life styles, liberating themselves from the constraints of imposed culture. The exhibition highlights the power of idiosyncrasy in the very heart of the socialist empire.
Resulting from a close collaboration between The Wende Museum and the London-based Wellcome Library, this exhibition will address the various layers of mutual suspicion, fear and mistrust between the Soviet Bloc and the Western world, and its impact on the lives of everyday people.
Ballet was part of the high drama of the “culture wars,” as the US and USSR jockeyed for position during the Cold War. The Soviet Union produced some of the greatest dancers the world has ever known, with the Bolshoi and Kirov companies as standard bearers. But there were also painful losses, such as the defections of star dancers Nureyev, Makarova, and Baryshnikov, and the stifling of dance innovation during a time of great creativity in the West. How did the culture wars fit into the larger context of Soviet and American ballet, and the place of dance in Soviet life?
The Wende Museum will invite contemporary artists to interpret the present through the lens of Cold War history, using the museum’s collection as a point of reference.
In 2014, curators Yevgeniy Fiks and Stamatina Gregory organized the exhibition “Monument to Cold War Victory” in New York’s Cooper Union, the result of an international competition they initiated, inviting artists to reflect on the question why there is no monument to Cold War victory, and how such a monument might look like if it would exist. The submissions were judged by a team of high-ranking international artists, curators and scholars, among whom Susan Buck-Morss, Boris Groys, and Vitaly Komar. Fiks and Gregory are collaborating with The Wende Museum to present the second iteration of this exhibition, for which the participating artists will present works that reflect the context of Los Angeles. All of the artworks inspire reflection on the character of the Cold War and its topical meaning.
Organized in collaboration with British-Slovenian media historian Sabina Mihelj and British cultural historian Susan Reid, this exhibition focuses on the impact of Cold War-era television programming in Eastern and Western Europe on private lives.