Gender Check

The catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (13 November 2009 - 14 February 2010) and Zachęta National Gallery of Art (20 March - 13 June 2010).

The catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (13 November 2009 - 14 February 2010) and Zachęta National Gallery of Art (20 March - 13 June 2010). The exhibition focused on gender in the art and social history of Eastern and Southeastern Europe–a field that has been unjustifiably neglected to date and that, as a result, is almost completely unknown. The art-historical research for this project examined the artistic output of these countries all the way back to the 1960s. Over the past decades, gender issues have been examined with an almost complete disregard for the artistic and scholarly positions that are presented here. Thus “Gender Check” not only extends and supplements the scope of the discourse, but also presents itself in a new historical and topographical context that encompasses the dialogue between the “East” and the “West” as a prerequisite for further research into and interpretations of the gender issue on a global scale. The “check”, in other words, is not confined to gender; it encompasses not only the relationship between the genders in art and their social foundations in the countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, but also the role of this discourse in the relations between the conflicting hemispheres of communist and capitalist systems–both before the fall of the Iron Curtain and amid the ideological, demographic, and ecological changes that came after. The concept or the fact of being ”checked” is not confined here to the verification of (art) history. Rather, it was one of the ubiquitous fundamental experiences of the people living under conditions of political control and surveillance in totalitarian regimes.