After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe

Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden)
October 16, 1999 – January 16, 2000

“After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe” exhibition, with over 130 artists, was the first major survey of post-communist art.

1999 marks ten years since the demolition of the Berlin Wall. To coincide with this Moderna Museet has over the past two years been planning a research programme entitled After the Wall.

The project sheds light on the visual art, film, photography and video that have developed in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, during the decade after perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In collaboration with the cultural ministries of the countries involved and with Soros Centers for Contemporary Art, the project is presented as an exhibition, book and a symposium.

The purpose of the project is to define the present situation in terms of the changes that have taken place and the scope of these changes in the respective countries. The exhibition is highly selective and only pieces shown on a qualitative basis have been exhibited. It is intended that the exhibition can also be set up outside the walls of Moderna Museet, in other places in Stockholm and the tour in both Western and Eastern Europe.

After the Wall focuses on the period from the mid-1980s to the present which has been marked by many dramatic political and cultural changes in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Perestroika, the shattering of the “Iron Curtain”, the end of the Cold War, the foundation of new states and their ways towards democracy, the reunification of Germany, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the Balkan and Chechen Wars have all marked this time within the post-totalitarian landscape. At first tentatively but with increasing intensity new forms of culture have begun to emerge.

Curators: Chief Curator Bojana Pejić, (Berlin) with David Elliott, Director of Moderna Museet and Iris Müller-Westermann, Curator of Moderna Museet, project leader.

Participating artists from BiH: Nebojša Šerić Šoba, Danica Dakić and Jusuf Hadžifejzović

Participation organized in collaboration with the SCCA.