Museum of Contemporary Art
Closes in 38 days
Stereotypes and images don't change overnight -- for many, eastern Europe is still the grim realm of espionage and concrete walls topped with barbed wire. Seeking to break down the Berlin Walls in our minds and take a fresh look at this vibrant and fast-changing region, "Positioning -- In the New Reality of European Art" presents 11 contemporary artists from Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The exhibition presents a mixed bag with rather too many video installations -- they even offer to let ticketholders return and finish viewing them on another day. Regardless, the Polish group Azorro's videos exhibit a wonderful, slowburn humor not unlike that of the BBC's classic comedy "The Office." Other works make their point more succinctly, like the impressive photographic works of Mila Preslova, in which she bedecks herself with the iconography of female roles, while fixing the viewer with a steadfast gaze that suggests anything but passivity.
Hungarian artist Antal Lakner's weighted "Double Gravity Suit" (2004-05), which 10 visitors a day are allowed to enter, hints at the former repression, and the feeling of weightlessness that follows the removal of such a burden. But his lead-weighted remote control and mouse device, along with Czech artist Kristof Kintera's baffling, useless appliances, suggest that the new freedom of Western consumerism may be placing fresh burdens on the liberated peoples of eastern Europe.