Past
Museums present their knowledge to a wider public. But what is the basis of this knowledge? Normally, visitors are not aware of the questions, issues, discussions and disputes behind an exhibition concept or even a simple wall text. In this case, artworks from the Wende collection are interpreted in different, often contradictory ways.
To understand the realities confronting us, we need historical and artistic reflection. In the first installment of a new discussion series, The Wende Museum invited contemporary artists to share their ideas about how the past gives meaning to the present. Chief curator Joes Segal moderated an interactive conversation with contemporary artists Farrah Karapetian and Christopher Wyrick as they considered what it meant to make art in times of irreconcilable alternative truths.
The Wende Museum's Audiovisual Archivist KateDollenmayer presents a free film screening at UC Santa Barbara's Art, Design, & Architecture Museum. A selection of short educational films and animation from East Germany and Czechoslovakia accompanies the exhibition Fair Trade (on view through April 30th) by Los Angeles artist Bari Ziperstein, highlighting the materials, processes, and aesthetics of everyday life during the Cold War.
On November 12, 2016, an Embassy of the German Democratic Republic officially represented the perished East German state in Los Angeles for four hours.
Three Los Angeles-based contemporary artists with personal ties to Cold War Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union will be invited to design a multimedia installation at the Wende Museum’s exhibition galleries.
Developed in close collaboration with the El Segundo Museum of Art and its Chief Curator, Bernhard Zünkeler, this exhibition presents objects from the Wende collection relating to central planning in Eastern Europe in conjunction with artworks from the collection of ESMoA.
Justin Lifflander has lived and worked in Russia for nearly thirty years. He started in 1987 in Moscow as a driver-mechanic at the US embassy, then served as a missile inspector on the INF treaty in Votkinsk. He was an executive with Hewlett-Packard for two decades, after which he became business editor of The Moscow Times newspaper. His memoir, How Not to Become a Spy: A Memoir of Love at the End of the Cold War, was published in English in 2014 and in Russian at the end of last year.
An illuminated lecture performed by Yelena Zhelezov and Kate Dollenmayer, COLD WORM (time, auto-corrected) is a presentation of slides and films from the Cold War archives of the Wende Museum, projected in their original formats.
Netherlands-based and Romanian-born performance artist and theatre-maker Ioana Tudor will present “About how my emotions were stolen by the machine. While I was just sitting there, reading about my father,” in response to the exhibition Facial Recognition.
A lecture and Q&A by A. Ross Johnson, with an introduction by German Consul General in Los Angeles Hans Jörg Neumann
The exhibition explores the dynamics of artistic collaborations behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War period.
The exhibition presented people from the Eastern Bloc as they were portrayed in paintings and photographs during the Cold War era.
A project by Dutch visual artists Daphne Rosenthal and Richtje Reinsma from the Netherlands, with assistance of Chief Curator Joes Segal and kindly supported by the Mondriaan Fund.
Selected from the Wende Museum’s vast collection of more than 1,200 pieces, this exhibition tells the story of the GDR through the lens of its commemorative plates.