Upcoming
Enjoy drinks and light refreshments in the Wende Sculpture Garden, plus a flash talk on "Utopian Ideas in Times of Moral Confusion" by Wende Museum Chief Curator and Director of Programming Joes Segal.
Join us for special kid-friendly activities all day on Sunday, April 28. Program materials and supplies are free!
Music at the Wende: SASSAS’ sound. concert series presents the premiere of Carmina Escobar’s The Fundamental Impermanence of All Things.
RSVPs open April 8, 2019, at 10 a.m.
Join us for the sixth installment of the Wende discussion series Art - Past – Present. Chief Curator Joes Segal will moderate an interactive conversation with Russian-born artist Vitaly Komar as he considers how interpreting the past informs the present.
My Brothers and Sisters in the North portrays the people behind the persistent clichés and stereotypes of a misunderstood nation and provides an in-depth look behind the garish façade of propaganda in a living environment that is usually inaccessible to us. The people encountered by the director on her journey through the country – engineers, soldiers, farmers, painters, seamstresses – are not chance acquaintances, they were chosen by the regime. Nevertheless, Cho approaches her protagonists with sincere interest, respect, and, most of all, devoid of any judgment. Thus appears a cheerful folk who, despite their often peculiar-seeming love towards their “leader,” have by no means given up on their dreams or the hope of reunification of both Koreas. Co-presented with the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles.
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.
The exhibition Tito in Africa – Picturing Solidarity, previously displayed at the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, documents the strong relationship between the Yugoslav state leader Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) and African heads of state.
How were people of color represented and perceived in the Soviet Union, which represented itself as a society free of racism? In his conceptual project The Wayland Rudd Collection, artist Yevgeniy Fiks brings together over 200 Soviet images — paintings, movie stills, posters, graphics, and more — of Africans and African Americans, spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s.
Medea: femme fatale and überwoman from the East. In the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East European writers and painters often turned to ancient mythology when they wanted to express their discontent with Communist rule. Their interpretations of mythological figures like Medea, Cassandra, or Penthesilea were crucial in shaping contemporary images for women, and sometimes they were straight-up punk. Organized in collaboration with the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, and guest curator Susanne Altmann.
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.
With their colorful surfaces and clear-cut symbols and images, flags and banners are effective carriers of unambiguous messages. At parades, party conventions, and demonstrations they convey a sense of political purpose and group identity. In the communist countries, flags symbolically represented the various organizations, institutions, and collectives that were considered the pillars of society. However, flags and banners can take on other, countercultural meanings as well. In the late 1980s, political dissidents cut out the socialist symbols at the center of the East German, Hungarian, and Romanian national flags. In this exhibition, the Wende Museum’s unique collection of Soviet Bloc flags will be paired with contemporary artwork, showcasing a wide range of uses for this medium.
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.
In the 1960s, as decolonization took place across the African continent and the civil rights movement heated up in the United States, Soviet political caricaturists published numerous anti-racist cartoons that captured these global events. This exhibition will feature a selection of these caricatures from the Ne boltai! poster archive in Prague, including original drawings by prominent Soviet caricaturists such as Boris Efimov, the principal political caricaturist for Izvestiia, and Mark Abramov, the principal political caricaturist for Pravda.