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| The Smile of Eastern Europe Margarita Zieda | |
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Since May last year, Germany has systematically set out to familiarise itself with the culture of the ten new states of the European Union. This appears to be still necessary today. Even though more than a decade has passed since the fall of the wall and the iron curtain, interest in and knowledge about events on the eastern side seems scarcer than it was in the early 1990s. My own personal experience in Berlin continues to confirm that the ordinary German with one or two tertiary qualifications knows little about Latvia - for example, only that it used to be a territory of the former Soviet Union. An old inhabitant of West Berlin cannot remember the cause of war in Yugoslavia in order to explain this to someone else, although his parents lived in this territory at the time and still live there today.
With the development of closer political and economic ties with its neighbours, the programme Kulturjahr der Zehn, translated into English as "Cultural Year of the Ten", has grasped the bull by the horns for the second time, using many varied initiatives to discover anew the culture of these countries. Mainly these are the viewpoints of western curators and their selection of works, which in this ‘cultural year' are constructing the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe, often merely confining themselves to pre-existing assumptions without searching for alternative ones. When speaking about Latvia, the approach is similar to that of the media: nine out of ten texts will be illustrated by the building of the Academy of Sciences (popularly known as the "collective farmers house") and a row of apartment blocks, and in one instance - an Art Nouveau ensemble. Audiences to these exhibition halls readily wish to see something like Kaspars Goba's photographs of "People of the Marsh", if referring to Eastern Europe. That is, talking in comparisons. Although Goba's people, of course, have already appeared in the "culture of ten" - at the exhibition last autumn organised by the Berlin Academy of Art, "E.U. Positive". Thus the discourse about dialogue fostered by the German ‘cultural year' (and it, after all, is a government subsidised programme) is often dissonant with the monologue occurring in reality. A Western European monologue about Eastern Europe. The photography exhibition, Bitte lächeln, Aufnahme! ("Smile please, you're on camera!"), also within the framework of the "Cultural Year of the Ten", opened at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin shortly before Christmas and will continue until 14 February. The curators of the exhibition, Alexander Tolnay and Manfred Schmalriede, were interested in the critically distanced view of the changed world that appears in East European photography, which could well be accompanied by irony or humour. The title of the exhibition is meant to refer to not just the act of photography itself, but also to the political act - accession to the European Union. Furthermore, in their opinion, the exhibition offers an excellent arena for the documentation of various points of view. The curators are interested in "straight photography" - a direct look at people and every day occurrences, without setting up shots for the camera or digital manipulation of the photo. Eastern Europe has answered the invitation to smile reservedly in the 120 photographs displayed in the exhibition. This invitation relates to photographs that have been created over a span of 40 years, and thus includes smiles of varying gradations - from subversion to sarcasm, unobtrusively and at the same time actively using the grotesque as the quintessence of life recorded in photographs. The time dimension stretches through Frantisek Dostal's Prague, photographed in the 1970s, where the tram line ends in the middle of the road, abutting a street light, and where huge nuts attached to a bike rider's baggage carrier wave like iron fists, and connects these with Martin Collar's pig ride on a Slovakian highway, recorded in the 21st century, where the animal's head and rear, covered with red scarves, speed towards the future with the drama of a Corrida bull. There is neither humour nor irony in the series of photographs "Grimaces of a Tired Town" by Lithuanian photographer Rimaldis Viksraitis, created from 1976 to 2001. The photographs capture a hopeless and ugly life, where people are the most unsightly, and simultaneously also the most central elements. Life, which is like a rubbish tip, and the poverty that fills these photographs are not so much impressions of the material, but of the spiritual level. Alongside geese, cats, pigs, nature, the people photographed are revealed as sick creatures with little chance of recovery. And it is not a masochistic self-critical diagnosis that can be read in Viksraitis' photos, but rather a documentation that avoids commentary. Photographer Mart Viljus has studied changes to the urban face of Estonia. With a step back in time - by photographing one and the same object framed in the same way in 1989, 1998 and 2002 - Viljus has created a tryptich that includes a dimension of symbolic generalisation. Thus, wooden gates by a stone wall with a drain pipe are replaced by ghastly concrete gates, which, when they disappear, open out to provide an unencumbered view, and it turns out there hasn't been anything defensible on the other side: in the distance one can see houses and a walking track. The black and white reality of Viljus's photographs is exchanged for colour, which paradoxically erases the colourful, replacing it with cool ascetics - a vegetable kiosk with a bold sign in Russian indicating the functional nature of the little building is replaced by glass architecture typical of banks, and nothing remains of the kiosk except an empty space. A wall girded by telephone booths is replaced by a layer of partly torn advertising flyers and posters, until it is all washed clean to neutral openness - a white wall. The exhibition's most vital depiction of the Baltic States is Andrejs Grants's Latvia - herds of cows at the seashore and a boat full of people on the beach at Miķeļtornis; a dog, which is being pulled by the scruff of its neck from water full of swimming people; a greying gentleman under a "Prince" sunshade surrounded by plastic furniture; a live monkey in a cage and stuffed pythons suspended in the air. The crowded landscape conveys the odd state of affairs in the "new territories", in which a new system of symbols is layered on top of the previous one, creating strange combinations - a new cultural description. Man does not appear on the lowest existential level of this landscape, at least not in Andrejs Grants's photographs. Despite these - just next to them - Grants's Polish colleague Maciej Skawinski's grey post-socialist landscapes unite people with a lethal weariness. It is as if dead people are "smiling" at Western Europe. The curators call this exhibition a display of mentality, which one could readily agree with when looking at the photos of the sportily religious mix of Malta or Cyprus, but what of the frightening grimaces in the face of a Lithuanian village? | |
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