Really, Socialism!?

Sep 11 – Nov 9, 2015

Momenta Art56 Bogart St, Williamsburg

Yevgeniy Fiks

Jing Yuan Huang

Jen Liu

Lisi Raskin

Anna Rubin

Curated by David Xu Borgonjon

Momenta Art is pleased to present Really, Socialism?!, an exhibition that examines the past of the socialist image in order to speculate on the future. Through the work of artists intimately involved in the aesthetic legacies of socialism, this exhibition seeks to stimulate viewers into a reappraisal of post-war art and its relevance for strategies of exit from the world-as-market.

Yevgeniy Fiks’ Pleshkas of the Revolution record, in Soviet academic style, Moscow cityscapes dotted with socialist emblems that were also gay cruising grounds. Huang Jing Yuan’s photorealist gray monochromes reflect on the televisual mediation of the Chinese Communist revolution and the crisis of faith after liberalization. The new abstract drawings and sculptural paintings of Lisi Raskin derive from her experience of the ex-Yugoslav Partisan monuments, focusing on the concealment and commemoration of history. A series of conversations with leading critics—respectively, Ksenia Nouril, Christine I. Ho and Eda Cufer—contextualizes these artists’ works within the latest art-historical research.

These contemporary reflections on the trajectory of post-war painting are complemented by a series of screenings and performances. Jen Liu’s video The Red Detachment will examine forms of bodily discipline by tracing the connections between the meat industry and the seminal Maoist ballet of the same name. Anna Rubin will present a rough cut of footage recording her relationship with a Leipzig teenager for whom cosplay serves as a means of reflecting on German history. In the closing event, Arseny Zhilyaev and Chang Yuchen will conclude with performative lectures on art institutions under socialism, respectively, experimental museology and technical life-drawing.

Really, Socialism?! intends to spotlight the diversity of official artistic practices in state socialism: not just Soviet Socialist Realism, but also its Maoist apostate Revolutionary Romanticism and the abstract modernism that flourished in former Yugoslavia, among others. Programs include an online reading group on socialist science fiction in collaboration with the New Centre for Research and Practice, focusing on an optimism about technology that seems almost alien today. This exhibition will be complemented by the launch of an online archive that translates, collates and introduces seminal tracts on socialist aesthetics.

-David Xu Borgonjon

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Details of public events, including dates, times and locations, will be posted online. All events, except for the Reading Group on October 10 & 17 at the New Center of Research and Practice, are free and open to the public:

September 13, 2-3:30PM

Huang Jing Yuan in conversation with Christine I Ho

September 27, 2-3PM

Curator tour of Armed by Design at the Interference Archive

October 4, 2-3:30PM

Yevgeniy Fiks in conversation with Ksenia Nouril

October 10/17 2-4PM

Reading Group on Socialist Science Fiction: The Scientific Image

Hosted by the New Centre for Research and Practice

October 11, 2-4PM

Curator tour of the Dodge Collection at the Zimmerli Museum

October 23, 7-8:30PM