Upcoming
To shed light on the ways Cold War history impacted human lives, the Fiona Chalom and Joel Aronowitz Historical Witness Project gathers oral histories from people who lived in the Eastern Bloc during the period from 1945 to 1991. This event will be a live interview conducted at the Wende Museum with Tomas Osinski, a Polish artist, architect, and former dissident.
The Wende recently acquired Osinski's significant personal collection of materials from the Polish opposition during the Soviet era. Moreover, Osinski organized and facilitated a large donation of documents, pamphlets, and photographs from other Polish collections. This live interview by actor and podcast host Mark Valley (Boston Legal, The Live Drop) will revisit Osinski's memories of the Polish underground.
Join us for special all-ages activities all day on Sunday, January 26, in conjunction with our Historical Witness Project Live Interview event. Participants will be invited to create artworks and zines in the spirit of Samizdat, the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state. Free and all materials will be provided.
wasteLAnd presents music driven by collective action and creation, both in the act of composition and in community-based realization. The program features world premieres by Richard Barrett and Nicholas Deyoe in addition to radical works by Raven Chacon, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Sarah Reid, and Wilfrido Terrazas. These works explore degrees of improvisation, highlighting the necessity of communal action and negotiation in these collective creations while also reflecting on grassroots political collectivism.
Chelle Barbour, Lezley Saar, and Sichong Xie, the Los Angeles-based contemporary artists who participate in the exhibition The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain, will speak about the works they selected for the exhibition, how they can be interpreted, and how they relate to specific themes in the artworks from Cold War-era Eastern Europe. The panel will be moderated by the Wende’s Chief Curator and Director of Programming Joes Segal.
Experience the virtual reality short film Pērkons: A VR Rockumentary, presented by Fallon. Pērkons: A VR Rockumentary tells the story of how the Latvian rock band Pērkons shook the Soviet establishment with homemade instruments, a 2 KW sound system, and a hard rock sound. The band was banned by the Latvian government twice and many of their fans were arrested. But the harder the authorities tried to silence Pērkons, the more powerful their music became.
Inspired by Latvian and Russian art of the ‘80s (in particular the work of Andris Breže and Ilya Kabakov), the virtual reality film creates an immersive 3D collage that juxtaposes Soviet-era architecture, archival footage, cutouts from 1980s magazines, and a 3D model texture made out of the band’s original sheet music. Viewers will experience the 11-minute film via Oculus GO headsets.
Nueva Canción: Songs of Protest and Resistance is a new, music-based multimedia event created by Sandra Powers and Timur, and performed by the glam rock band Timur and the Dime Museum. Produced by Beth Morrison Projects, the concert is rooted in the Latin American song movement that began in the 1960s and criticized political oppression and spurred sociopolitical change. These songs told multilayered stories about unequal distribution of wealth, corrupt politics, and abuses of power, evolving from folk to incorporate electronic, classical, and rock influences. Nueva Canción focuses on the songbook of Mercedes Sosa, the driving force behind the movement. In addition, Timur’s memories of being raised under communism and then witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union will provide a personal perspective on the complexity of political regimes.
The twentieth century has seen the devastating effects of a blind belief in ideological blueprints, from fascism and national socialism to “real existing” socialism. But can we survive without utopian ideas? How much dreaming is needed to shape our world?
Dog Star Orchestra is an ensemble and a once-a-year festival of experimental music, started in 2005 by composer Michael Pisaro as a way of playing recent experimental music by young composers and classic pieces from the experimental tradition. Described as “messily exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times, Dog Star events happen throughout the Los Angeles area and often feature offbeat performances in out-of-the-way places, alongside more traditional concert settings. Dog Star Orchestra is one of the main presenters fostering and documenting the strong local experimental music scene, as well as presenting work that would otherwise not be heard in the U.S.
The twentieth century saw a constant struggle between media propaganda and media disclosures, top-down and bottom-up counter-narratives. How does twenty-first-century social media fit in this pattern? Has it contributed to the democratization of knowledge or to a stronger filtering and framing of reality? Why has “fake news” become a serious competitor to “real” news? And how to differentiate between the two? In Search of Our Times is a six panel discussions presented as part of Wende Conversations: A Discussion Series Supported by Susan Horowitz and Rick Feldman.
Globalization is all about the free flow of people, goods, capital, and ideas, but more than ever states are encapsulating themselves, closing their borders and hesitant to recognize immigrants as part of the nation. Why are border crossings, both physically and culturally, conceived as a threat? What motivates the current worldwide tendency toward exclusion? In Search of Our Times is a six panel discussions presented as part of Wende Conversations: A Discussion Series Supported by Susan Horowitz and Rick Feldman.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. What is its current role and status? Is it still possible to believe in universal human rights, even if they are constantly challenged at home and abroad? Has postmodernism eroded the belief in universal ethics? How could we restore ethics in politics? The six-panel discussions are presented as part of Wende Conversations: A Discussion Series Supported by Susan Horowitz and Rick Feldman.
The series of (mostly) peaceful revolutions that took down the Berlin Wall effectively ended state socialism in Eastern Europe, and brought not just a political but also a material transformation. Countless people who lived through socialism discarded the household and consumer items they had lived with and loved or hated for many years, as they finally had access to higher-standard goods. This exhibition presents the metamorphosis of household and consumer goods from objects of everyday life to items in a museum collection, by way of flea markets, and invites contemporary artists to position them in the here and now.
Proving that photography is no more “objective” than any other medium, two photographers with the same mission offer very different views of East Germany. Through reports published by Stern, unpublished photographs, and documents and photos from the Stasi archives (both photographers were closely monitored by the East German secret police), this exhibition highlights Thomas Höpker and Harald Schmitt’s very different approaches to East German life, culture, and society.
In the fall of 1981, Bill Aron, the “Dean” of American Jewish photographers, visited the cities of Leningrad, Minsk, and Moscow. In each city, Aron photographed the local synagogue – which served as the common ground for Soviet Jews who were trying to hold on to, or regain, their religious heritage – as well as Jews who wished to leave the country, the so-called refuseniks. He also made striking portraits of the Soviet Jewish population at home and in public life. Aron’s photos will be paired with artist Yevgeniy’s Fiks’s images and artifacts from Birobidzhan, the Jewish autonomous region in the Soviet Union near the border with China.
In addition to art and artifacts, museums present knowledge, aiming to simultaneously educate and entertain the public. But where do museums get their information from? And how do they turn historical facts into an exhibition narrative? Traversing the minefield of postmodern relativism, on the one hand, and “alternative facts,” on the other, this exhibition explores how “facts” are constructed while aiming to restore the arena for informed interpretation and conversation.