Upcoming
Berlin, 1982. Morale is at rock bottom in East Germany as the specter of all-out nuclear war looms. The Ministry for State Security is hunting for creative new weapons in the war against the class enemy – and their solution is stranger than fiction. Rather than guns, tanks, or bombs, the Stasi develop a program to fight capitalism through rhyme and verse, winning the culture war through poetry – and the result is the most bizarre book club in history. But as the agents involved became steeped in poetry and reveled in its imaginative ambiguity, the program took a strange turn. Rather than entrenching State ideology, they began to question it, and the GDR’s secret weapon dramatically backfired.
The seventh program in the In Search of Truth series is a conversation about magic and sorcery in the quest for truth. Members of our student council invite Krystyn Lambert, mentalist, medium, and mystic, to speak about alternative dimensions of reality.
Matthew Moore will discuss his recent photographic project Post-Socialist Landscapes, an eight-year exploration of monument removal and relocation in countries that were at one time occupied by the Soviet Union.
Matthew is an explorer of places, both real and imagined. His photographic process blends research and cartography to create bodies of work that investigate the way history and collective memory is influenced through interventions in the landscape. Past residencies include the Nida Art Colony in Nida, Lithuania and the Joshua Tree Highlands AIR program in Joshua Tree, California. Matthew is the recipient of Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards in 2015 and 2018. Matthew earned his MFA from Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia in 2009 and a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan in 2000.
Taking as its starting point ceramics from China’s porcelain capital of Jingdezhen, this exhibition explores the history and artistic production of the Cultural Revolution. It presents imagery from the period while investigating the circumstances of production, the relationship between art and ideology, and the agency of the artists working within restrictive frameworks. The exhibition also looks at the afterlife of the movement through contemporary art, wherein which Chinese artists have appropriated and adapted the iconic images from this period for their own use today.
Curated by Kathleen Reinhardt and first shown at the Albertinum Museum in Dresden, this exhibition is a living homage to the history of Mail Art and visual poetry and a recognition of their ongoing resonance.