Non-Aligned Modernity. Eastern-European Art at FM Milano

There was a time in which the term “Iron Curtain” was more than a simple definition for the boundary that used to divide Europe into two separate areas. A time when Westerners thought to be able to describe what Easterners were able to do, without even knowing what they were about to do. A time in which the “other’s” specificity and the “other’s” qualities circulated in several political discourses as a ghost track. That time is still here but brick by brick someone is trying to dismantle it and forget it. But what would happen if we started to reconsider that time and that space where “others” lived, and still live? What if we start with a question about art? What if we try to reallocate elsewhere the history of art? Maybe it would be the time to talk about a “socialist modernism” that remained peripheral, clandestine and for sure less visible, but similarly capable of renewing political and artistic experimentation.

Gábor Attalai Negative-Star 1970 bw-photograph-392-x-301-mm-Marinko Sudac Collection.

The exhibition Non-Aligned Modernity. Eastern-European Art from the Marinko Sudac Collection at FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea in Milan, curated by Marco Scotini in collaboration with Lorenzo Paini and Andris Brinkmanis, tries to retrace the history of modernism from the second half of the 20th century from an unconventional point of view: the non-Western one. Where equality is concerned, it is vital that these narrations are implemented. The exhibition has a dual path: rediscovering the “non-aligned” Yugoslavia on the one hand, and on the other displaying specific qualitative projects aimed at pushing forward the importance of Eastern Europe in the artistic debate. Historically speaking, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is a group of states that are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. The organization was founded in Belgrade in 1961. In fact, the exhibition starts from former Yugoslavia, aiming at resettling the hegemony in contemporary art history, like the NAM aims at ensuring “national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries” (quoting Fidel Castro 1979). Even though the NAM is still alive, its political power became irrelevant after 1989 and the vanishing of the Eastern Bloc. Since the end of the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement has been forced to redefine itself and reinvent its purpose in the current world system. The raising and affirmation of globalization squeezed the foundational ideologies of the NAM into a marginal condition, and nowadays a non-institutional voice seems to be needed in order to struggle against Western colonialism and imperialism.

Radomir Damnjanoviå Damnjan In-Honour of Avant Garde 1973 bw-photograph 295-x-397 mm Marinko Sudac Collection

In this delicate context, the role of art and of exhibitions is to investigate through interesting archival research. In the case of the group show Non-Aligned Modernity, the archive is the Marinko Sudac Collection, based in Zagreb. The collection encompasses a large number of artworks of progressive Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde and Post-Avant-Garde art, including morphologically and conceptually similar artistic developments, as well as various practices of experimental art across Europe and beyond from the beginning of the 20th century until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Marco Scotini, together with his curatorial research group, has been absorbed in the Marinko Sudac Collection, trying to give a “discursive order” to a collection that hosts material traces left behind by a historical period not far in time but lost in memory.

Non-Aligned Modernity Eastern-European Art from the Marinko Sudac Collection, Exhibition view

In recent years, it became evident how the political affirmation of the neoliberal approach is exclusionary in nature. It leaves little room for art and creative communication. At the same time, it became clear how the Western perspective on art history has sometimes failed in its demand of plurality. Scotini worked on and with art history, to rebuild and somehow re-stage philologically the climate of the Eastern Avant-Garde. This approach lets emerge an interesting and almost unknown scenario, where the supposed predominance (hegemony) of Western art is nullified. The exhibition looks back at Eastern-European art with works dating back to 1909, many of the pieces from the Marinko Sudac Collection having been displayed at London’s Tate Modern, at Haus der Kunst in Munich and at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Non-Aligned Modernity is made up of over 120 artists and over 700 artworks and documents.

Group of Six Authors Exhibition action on the Republic Square Zagreb 17 19.7.1978 1978 bw photograph 104 x 147 mm Marinko-Sudac Collection.

In the first part of the exhibition, a large space is dedicated to artists from former Yugoslavia. For instance, there are urban interventions, graphic contaminations, performance and video experimentations, that were at the center of the collective practices of Group of Six Authors, BOSCH+BOSCH, KOD, and Verbumprogram. In the exhibition, we find a very young Marina Abramović, but also Mladen Stilinovic, Goran Trbuljak, Tomislav Gotovac, Katalin Ladik, Vlado Martek, and Radomir Damnjanović Damnjan, among others. What emerges is also a certain decentralization of the artistic debate in Yugoslavia, and as a matter of fact, artists from marginal urban areas such as Subotica, Vojvodina (BOSCH+BOSCH; Bogdanka Poznanovic) have contributed to the development of the Avant-Garde in the Balkans.

Július Koller Ping-Pong -J.K. 1970 bw photograph 178 x 161 mm photo by Milan Sirkovský Marinko Sudac Collection

The second part of the exhibition is dedicated to artists from former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, such as Mangelos, Julije Knifer, Mladen Stilinovic, Sanja Ivekovic, Julius Koller, Stano Filko, Dora Maurer, Goran Trbuljak, and Natalia LL. These artists show how the Iron Curtain was anyhow bypassable – artists like Natalia LL or Július Koller, who talk of the West with awareness and lucidity. After the Prague Spring of 1968, artists were forced to work outside of the “institutions”, and this exhibition draws the interesting development of those conceptual practices, that were quite often hosted by non-institutional spaces such as private flats, cellars and students’ homes.

Natalia LL Consumer Art 1972 6 x bw photograph collage cardboard 330 x 310 mm Marinko-Sudac-Collection

The solution that Non-Aligned Modernity whispers is that the reconstruction of a new History of Art is first of all a restoration of a non-aligned political point of view. Scotini grasps that a hypothetical “post-millennium bug” may lie in the qualities of the so-called “other”. The problem of modernity is first of all a problem of gained supremacy. This may appear as a contradiction but it is not. We may argue that the decoupling of time from the idea of “art” in the context of the death of Modernism has resulted in aesthetic confusion, and that the dominant centers of artistic production still dictate what counts as contemporary in contemporary art. New trans-national alliances are formed in the time of new nationalisms. New networks and relations may be gradually developed in order to start harbouring ideas, projects and mobility, in a political context where ideas, projects and mobility are under attack.

Non-Aligned Modernity. Eastern-European Art from the Marinko Sudac Collection is on display at Fm Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, Milano until December 23, 2016.