The Partisan, the Dissident, and the “Postsocialist Contemporary”

The last months have seen two major retrospective exhibitions of women artists from (post-)socialist Eastern Europe at the Stedelijk Museum: Ana Lupas from the former Soviet satellite state of Romania and Marina Abramović from the Serbian republic in former Yugoslavia. In her ascension to the position of popular phenomenon, Abramović’s socialist past has become somewhat of a footnote in the artist’s grand narrative, which since the 1970s has been rooted in a Western canon of performance art. “Marina [as the artist is now commonly referred to] seems to signal both everything and nothing,” proposed Netherlands-based cultural practitioner Isabelle Sully in a roundtable conversation on the Abramović exhibition.1 The force of a post-socialist “self-historicization” reigns triumphant. Is it even worth mentioning that the Amsterdam retrospective began with a gallery devoted to “the communist body”? Before any of the documentation and reenactments of canonical performance works, visitors entered a carpeted room swathed in lush red paint, and they gazed upon The Hero (2001), which shows Marina atop a white horse holding a large white flag that, along with her hair, blows in the wind. In the imposing size of the wall projection, the artist’s body appears to scale, or even slightly larger. Below this dramatic scene sits a vitrine with materials from her family’s socialist past. Is this stately image of the partisan hero a footnote or an epigraph? If the latter, what is its function in the story being told? In the context of a mega-museum like the Stedelijk in a Western European capital city like Amsterdam, what narratives of women’s artistic production under and after socialism emerge in the exhibition space and what constructions are even possible?

After leaving the Abramović exhibition, the figure of the partisan hero, and my question about the optics of this figure in a neoliberal scopic regime in the museum’s temporary exhibition hall, I return to the entry foyer. Back on the ground floor, I catch on my righthand side a vista view glimpse onto the large-scale metal forms that would have, decades before, served as the armatures for the harvest wreaths of Romanian artist Ana Lupas’s The Solemn Process (1964–2008). As the wallpapered documentation images behind this monumental installation show, the armatures were originally installed in various locations in the countryside around Cluj-Napoca where the artist has lived and worked all her life. The grid of warm sepia-toned photographic reproductions shows the armatures in situ and, in some cases, being attended to by people from the local farming communities. Wrapped in vegetation, they have a lightness—in some cases, even buoyancy—to them. This stands in stark contrast to the scene encountered in the gallery. Framed by the doorway and white walls of the museum, the metal forms appear as cold, bluish-hued skeletal masses sitting heavily on the floor and cordoned off by small metal stanchions. Here, they become, on the one hand, a rather solemn field of fallen bodies, and, on the other hand, a post-industrial landscape that affectively reinforces a feeling of irretrievability, whether of socialist or pre-socialist pasts.

Although this is the first work that a visitor sees, The Solemn Process is, in fact, the last work in On This Side of the River Elbe, Lupas’s current large-scale exhibition at the Stedelijk. The first part of a two-part retrospective program (with part two, Intimate Space – Open Gaze, opening at the Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein on November 1, 2024), the Amsterdam presentation features Lupas’s work with textiles, which are interwoven with long-term collaborative projects, such as The Solemn Process or her well-known Humid Installation (1970). On This Side of the River Elbe actually begins in the back corner of the museum’s ground floor. There, a several-meter-tall image of Lupas as young art student is nestled into one of the relief archways that adorn the museum’s walls with the exhibition text next to her. 

Crossing the threshold into this “first” room of the exhibition offers a very different entry point: Lupas’s Coats to Borrow (1989), the Stedelijk’s recent acquisition around which the exhibition was constructed. In this installation, five coats, which are handmade by Lupas from rough industrial fabrics and scraps of other trims and notions, hang on various racks around the gallery. One coat lies draped over a metal bedframe. In contrast to the gritty browns, greys, and greens of the coats, the iron tubing of the racks and frame are painted a bright orange. Against them, the coats feel heavy and handmade, invoking a kind of ‘gravitas of the times’ in which they were made. Originally, they were passed between artists in Lupas’s circle at Atelier 35—an organization formed for and by young artists in the last years of the socialist period—as a form of protest, with every wearer sewing a patch with their name into the lining. Some coats have numerous patches, and some only Lupas’s name. 

The coats bring together three primary components of the exhibition’s narrative: the use of textiles, the relationality of Lupas’s work, and what, in their introduction to the catalogue, the exhibition’s curators call “a form of hidden resistance to the dehumanization of the totalitarian regime…”2 This phrasing also appears at several points throughout the wall texts in the galleries and is further reinforced in the collection of catalogue essays, which have the double responsibility of art historically distinguishing Lupas’s oeuvre from comparable works produced in Western capitalist contexts during the time (think, for instance, of Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”) and of identifying the artist’s radical critiques and subtle subversions of the Eastern socialist conditions within which she lived and worked.

If the exhibition closes with a field of fallen bodies, it begins with a field of coats, now empty, waiting for the dissident bodies of wearers that will never return. This arc, toggling between dissident wearer and fallen body, runs throughout the exhibition, connecting early and later works vis-à-vis intersections of material experiment and public action, rather than along strictly chronological lines. Coats to Borrow is followed by four galleries devoted to the multiple generations of Lupas’s canonical Identity Shirts (1969–1990), as well as other textile-based wall works from the late 1960s through the early 1990s. Tucked into the gallery with the first-generation Identity Shirts (1969) is Lupas’s On This Side of the River Elbe (1963), the earliest work in the exhibition and the one from which the exhibition’s title is drawn. As the geographical boundary marking the border between East and West Germany between 1949 and 1990, the Elbe served as a demarcating line. And yet, in Lupas’s textile work, the line breaks apart, dispersing into a field of small delicately placed wool knots that turn the looming political boundary of the Iron Curtain into a haptic cartography. The next two galleries feature materials and documentation from the Humid Installation, including later iterations (e.g. the 1994 re-staging of the work for the Europa, Europa exhibition) as well as reconfigurations of the draped fabrics in Memorial of Cloth (1991) and Monument of Cloth (2005).3  

The final galleries before The Solemn Process introduce more diffuse elements of Lupas’s later works, including her geopolitical concerns in the Romania Arrested (1989) series of textile sculptures (done in collaboration with the sculptor SPATARU); and her interest in self-historicization enacted in the EAST (1996) installation, comprising eight ‘found’ wall labels for artists from Eastern Europe, including herself. Through the galleries, visitors follow Lupas’s thought process. They are invited into the shifting material manifestations of her projects’ core gestures—for example, how the form of the draped fabric is transformed from the lightness of the textile in Humid Installation to the heaviness of the aluminium masses in Memorial of Cloth. With each step in the exhibition’s narrative construction, the curators rehearse, and visitors reinscribe again and again, a march toward 1989, from dissidence to the fall.

This arc tracks with one of the most familiar narratives for art from former socialist Eastern Europe: the story of the heroic dissident-figure who defied the restrictions of socialist realism and the “dehumanization” of collectivization under the party apparatus. The by-line for the review of Lupas’s exhibition in the NRC (a widely read Dutch daily newspaper) encapsulates this story: “The Romanian avant-garde artist Ana Lupas (1940) has spent her life subversively paying tribute to human dignity in a country ravaged by communist repression.”4 Opening with a sardonic contextual note on the ‘evils’ of socialist Romania, the review then continues: “On the other side of the Elbe, you were put in jail if you spoke your mind; famine reigned and factories spewed poisonous black fumes into the air without a care in the world. People who got sick from it—oh, that was the price of socialist progress.” The geographic line of the river produces a useful spatial binary upon which to build up a very old Cold War split. There is this side and that side; but which side is this? Lupas’s this maps that, right? On that side is jail, famine, pollution, and sickness. On this side—or is it that side?—well… 

At this point in history, over thirty years after the dissolution of the “socialist East,” it is widely known that the situation was much more complicated and that such binary logics are an ideological effect of a story of ‘capitalist redemption’ rather than concrete description of completely differing material conditions. And yet, these old stories are reinscribed again and again, gallery by gallery. They are not, it’s important to emphasize, simply impositions from the West, but, rather, the outcome of years of post-1989 collaboration toward what art historian Octavian Esanu has called “the postsocialist contemporary.” The dissident, according to Esanu, plays an important role in the capitalist transition in Eastern European cultural sectors, or in what we might call ‘conversion into the contemporary.’ As the art historian writes:

[…] Cold War liberalism and the antipolitics of the socialist dissidents are fully allied. Both position themselves against the holistic continuity of art and politics, as advocated and practiced to some extent under the cultural politics of socialism. The common anti-socialist front shared by the dissidents and the leading neoliberal intellectuals in the West is what constituted the foundation for the institutionalization of new norms and procedures in the post-1989 contemporary art.5

The “story of triumph” in this recounting is primarily that of the “socialist dissident” whose commitment to autonomy and, with it, to the development of unofficial networks, print materials, and event cultures had already—even if unknowingly—laid the groundwork for the conditions of what would become the postsocialist contemporary. “With the return of capitalism in Eastern Europe,” Esanu asserts, “art had to gain back its alleged autonomy and serve again as a workshop of bourgeois autonomy.”6

This, then, is a story that is co-produced in uneven combinations of domestically rooted and imported infrastructures across the region of the (former) socialist East. In Lupas’s case, it is worth remembering her position as the daughter of the pre-socialist cultural elite whose family villa in Cluj-Napoca was seized under state collectivization in 1952, with the artist regaining ownership only after a lengthy legal process began in 1990. One could understand the artist’s commitment to collaboration with farming communities around the villa as an extension of the allyship outlined by Esanu. Dissidence is always contextual, as is allyship. They can take many forms, including those that might sit as uneasy in our stomachs as does binary thinking. 

Esanu’s analysis of the postsocialist contemporary continues with an investigation the role of documentation and its taxonomical frameworks of labelling. This administration of meaning creates the conditions of possibility for storytelling: Put simply, we cannot tell a story for which we do not have a system of language. In this way, as curator Asia Tsisar writes, “the very act of storytelling [can play] a cruel trick on a story… [because] we do not know stories that have not been uttered, as well as we don’t see what has not been named.”7 The delimited set of possibilities for uttering and naming under the conditions of the postsocialist contemporary thus produce uneasy effects. Tsisar continues: 

What we know is a question of power dynamics, a war of narratives… some stories are just too complicated, and we don’t have the language to tell them, so we give up on them. Every time something is labelled “Eastern European art,” it has to fit into words and meanings designed for someone else’s experience. […] It is both sad and ridiculous because, instead of working on what actually happened, you are forced to explain why something that was “supposed” to happen didn’t. And most importantly, all these efforts prevent the actual understanding of what “Eastern European art” is or could be, but just turn it into a product designed exclusively for export, while in reality, the king is naked.8

If the king is naked, what next? If not the dissident, what else? These are open questions to which the Lupas retrospective does not offer any particularly compelling answers. While the exhibition is an excellent moment to see many canonical works and documentation from the artist’s oeuvre, it also feels a missed opportunity to grapple with the complicated stories. What if the haptic cartography of Lupas’s On This Side of the River Elbe became the organizing principle? What if the social relations operating on the ground between Lupas and her collaborators in rural Romania or Atelier 35 were a throughline? 

Perhaps a retrospective is not the place to do this, or perhaps it is the ideal one—to undo the narrative of the dissident-hero(ine) likely starts with undoing the structures of genius-making set into the retrospective as exhibitionary genre. Or perhaps the Stedelijk is not the place to do this, but, in the context of Western Europe (and, in particular, the Netherlands) where the ascent of explicitly oppressive political regimes is in full swing, I would propose that it is the ideal one. From where I sit on this side of the Elbe, it is the humanitarian, infrastructural, and ecological ravages of neoliberal capitalism that feel closer than ever. Old Cold War binary tricks should not divert our attention from this.

1 Becket Flannery, Annie Goodner, and Isabelle Sully, “Marina Abramović Marina Abramović,” Tangents: Art Reviews & Writing, 25 June 2024 https://tangents.art/reviews/marina-abramovic. 

2 Leontine Coelewij and Letizia Ragaglia, “Introduction,” in Ana Lupas, ed. Gwen Perry, Masha van Vliet, and Carlos Zepeda Aguilar (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2024), 10.

3 Europa, Europa: Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittel- und Osteuropa was an exhibition staged at the Kunst- und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in 1994. As the Former West online platform explains: “it was highly influential in the region as a defining post-1989 moment of entry into the dominant Western art historical discourse of post-war modernism and contemporary art production.” See https://formerwest.org/ResearchLibrary/EuropaEuropaDasJahrhundertderAvantgardeinMittelundOsteuropa.

4 Lucette ter Borg, “Artist Ana Lupas escaped Romanian repression through cunning actions,” NRC, 17 May 2024, https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/05/17/met-listige-acties-ontkwam-kunstenares-ana-lupas-aan-de-roemeense-repressie-a4199220#modal-open.

5 Octavian Esanu, The Postsocialist Contemporary: The Institutionalization of Artistic Practice in Eastern Europe after 1989 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 137.

6 Ibid., 10.

7 Asia Tsisar, “The Role You Made Me Play: About Unobvious Difficulties of Studying Eastern European Art,” Secondary Archive, https://secondaryarchive.org/the-role-you-made-me-play-about-unobvious-difficulties-of-studying-eastern-european-art/.

8 Ibid.

Megan Hoetger is a performance and media historian, researcher, and curator based in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and from 2019-2024 was a program curator with the Amsterdam-based arts organization If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. Across her scholarly and curatorial practices, Hoetger is concerned with historiographic method and the embodied politics of remembering. Her ongoing archival work investigates distribution infrastructures for underground time-based art and film screening events in the context of (post-)Cold War internationalisms. Hoetger’s writings appear in a number of publications, including the 2021 anthology In and Out of View: Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Performance Art.

All installation photos: Peter Tijhuis 

Image of Identity Shirt: Photo: Mark Blower. Ovidiu Sandor Collection

Images of Humid Installation: Unknown photographer. Courtesy the artist

Archival photos of The Solemn Process: Courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna

This text was supported by a Public Humanities Grant from Humanities NY.