WENDE
MUSEUM O F T H E C O L D WA R
INTRODUCTION Under the cloak of the accepted artistic media, radical women artists provoked, protested, played with fire and experimented. Working in the former people’s republics of Hungary, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic, they rejected socialist and bourgeois role models alike. With this double refusal they usually exposed themselves to more risk than their male colleagues. Yet it is precisely this compounded degree of defiance and energy in their pictorial language that still makes itself felt today. If their artistic approaches contradicted the teachings of a given art college, this was not so much because the doctrine of Socialist Realism was demanded everywhere with equal fervor, but because innovative techniques and motifs tended to rouse suspicions. The tighter the grip of state repression, the more established independent counter-publics became: in urban subculture, in church circles, in rural havens, or in applied fields such as crafts or architecture. The Medea Insurrection draws together these female positions and presents them in the context of their Eastern European origins. At long last, their aesthetic originality and struggle for visibility are given a stage. To show topical connections between the Cold War past in Eastern Europe and the here and now, the Wende Museum invited three artists working in L.A. today whose works resonate with the themes in the exhibition.
The Medea Insurrection was conceptualized and curated by Susanne Altmann for the Albertinum (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden). It has been adapted for its Culver City appearance by the Wende Museum’s Anna Rose Canzano, Dany Naierman, and Joes Segal.
The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain is part of Wunderbar Together: The Year of German-American Friendship 2018/19, an initiative funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, implemented by the Goethe-Institut, and supported by the Federation of German Industries (BDI).
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