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This painting of door buzzers alludes to Soviet public housing projects. It suggests that the Soviet state has given each of its republics, represented by their national flags, its own metaphorical apartment. The Lithuanian flag is coming off the hinge, a reference to the fact that Lithuania was the first republic to secede from the Soviet Union on March 11, 1990. The other two Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia, followed soon after, declaring themselves independent on May 4, 1990, and August 20, 1991, respectively. In the painting, their flags no longer show the Soviet emblem of the hammer and sickle. The title of the work is written on a torn piece of paper, reminiscent of the rental signs that were in use during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Yuri Leonov, To Each Family an Individual Apartment, 1991
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Two separate land masses, “Mother Armania” and “Artsakh,” are painted in the colors of the Armenian flag, and separated by a line of barbed wire. On the bottom-right corner of the work the word “Democracy” is painted. The region, with its majority Armenian population within Azerbaijani territory, is highly contested. According to the Armenian perspective, as represented by this work, Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, refers to the historic Armenian region. According to the Azerbaijani perspective, the region has been militarily occupied by Armenia since the early 1990s despite UN Security Council condemnation, when many Azerbaijani civilians were expelled from the region and beyond. The name on the right edge of the painting, S. Serzh, might be the artist’s signature or could refer to Serzh Sargsyan, the former president of Armenia who in the late 1980s and early 1990s was involved in the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Unknown, Democracy, n.d.
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This map of the Soviet Union resembles dry bread breaking apart. Some of the cracks represent borders between the union’s various republics that claimed their independence in a delicate political situation that was further aggravated by food shortages. On the left side of the map, a Communist star is discernible in the cracks around where Moscow would be located. Dry bread had a powerful significance in the Soviet Union as a symbol of shortage and hunger. The edges of this depiction of the Soviet Union bear a resemblance to a bloody piece of meat. Alexander Vaganov, USSR,Year 1991, 1991
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