L’Internationale is a confederation of European museums working in collaboration with universities and other partners. The confederation takes its name from the 19th century workers’ anthem, L’Internationale, which called for an equitable and just global society. The confederation’s guiding ambitions are to contribute to a plural internationalism based on the values of difference and horizontal exchange among a constellation of cultural agents, locally rooted and globally connected.
The biggest challenges lying ahead require international solutions. Climate change, migration, restructuring debt and the banking system all demand coherent and comprehensive international action. The intensification of these problems started between 1979 and 1995 with economic globalisation and the end of the Cold War. L’Internationale is engaged in a five-year research programme to explore this important period in the formation of today’s world system. Each of the partners looks at the 1980s from their own historical and geographic position, weaving local stories into an international narrative.
The programme includes exhibitions, symposia and publications in the partner venues and are reflected upon in the online platform: L’Internationale Online.
Activities include:
Now:
How did we get here
3 September–29 November 2015
SALT, Istanbul
How did we get here delves into Turkey’s recent past starting from 1980, a period that introduced free market economy under military rule. The exhibition gives an account of the decade, with an emphasis on Istanbul, through archival materials including magazines, advertisements, photographs, video recordings and films. Works in the exhibition by Halil Altındere, Serdar Ateşer, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Barış Doğrusöz, Ayşe Erkmen, Esra Ersen and Hale Tenger deal with the political and cultural climate of the 1980s to contribute a broader understanding of the social dynamics in this period.
NSK from Kapital to Capital: Neue Slowenische Kunst – an Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia
May–August 2015
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana
This exhibition and corresponding conference covered a period that marked the final decade of Yugoslavia, highlighting the fact that the NSK art collective was equally critical of the coming global capitalism and of the failing outgoing socialism.
A publication of the same title combines primary documents and contextual information with new commissioned texts.
Upcoming:
ENERGY FLASH.
The Rave Movement
16 June–25 September 2016
M HKA, Antwerp
This exhibition considers the 1980s and ’90s rave culture as Europe’s last big youth movement. This music-based culture embraced self-practice, invention and unbridled creativity.
Today’s Beginnings?
In and Around the 1980s
April–October 2016
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Today’s Beginnings? analyses the big cultural transformations of the 1980s through the lens of artistic practice. The exhibition aims to trace the genealogy of the present, recuperating these histories for their significance today.
The New Sappers. Artistic Practices of Dissension in Spain in the 1980s
November 2016–February 2017
MACBA, Barcelona
This exhibition will explore the underground scene in Spain through music, visual arts, cinema, and literature in the post-Franco 1980s, a moment of newly established democracy in the country when the political parties used the powerful lure of culture as a form of mediation.
The Multiple Origins of Contemporary Art in Today’s Europe
January–June 2016
KASK / L’Internationale Online, Ghent
In this MA seminar, students explore the European 1980s through the work of artists active in that period. It consists of six sessions, each co-organised by a partner of L’Internationale who have invited an artist to select a key term that defines his or her artistic production in the 1980s.
Recent:
Minimal Resistance. Between late modernism and globalisation: artistic practices during the ’80s and ’90s
16 October 2013–5 January 2014
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid—exhibition
With this display of works from its collection, the Museo Reina Sofía looked at art produced in the 1980s and 1990s in Spain and within an international context. Minimal Resistance focused on the artists’ search for spaces of resistance in a globalised world.
