October 3–November 29, 2014
Opening: October 2, 6pm
District Berlin
Bessemerstraße 2-14
12103 Berlin
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 2–6pm
post [at] district-berlin.com
Curators: Ulrike Gerhardt and Susanne Husse
in conversation with Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė, [BLOK] (Ivana Hanaček, Ana Kutleša, Vesna Vuković), Ana Bogdanović, Snejana Krasteva, Eglė Mikalajūnė, Maya Mikelsone, Anca Rujoiu
A project of District Berlin, funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin.
“We understand that our generation’s mission is to revise this strategically demonized past.”
–Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė (artist and curator, ŽemAt)
The Forgotten Pioneer Movement (TFPM) is an interdisciplinary performance and exhibition project about the experiences of the last, transitional generation between socialism and post-socialism. As a fictional movement, TFPM addresses the impact and the societal perspectives of the “last pioneers”: a generation whose childhood and youth is linked to the times of the Perestroika and the “post-Western” Europe of the 1990s.
As a modernist phenomenon and ex-symbol of childhood and adolescent identification, the figure of the pioneer lends itself to an investigation of the many inscriptions of educational institutions and publicly mobilized ideologies in the former “East” and “West.” TFPM combines strategies and discourses from visual as well as performative arts and cultural theory in order to approach “the future behind us,” observed by Edit András, as a pan-European experience beyond geopolitical classifications. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin wall, TFPM suggests new constellations between this remote future and insignia of the present.
Set #A comprises performances at different locations in public space in Berlin. Set #B is an exhibition at District. Set #C—”The Pioneer Camp of ReVision”—opens a public seminar.
Set #A: performances
Participants: bankleer, Kasia Fudakowski, Snejana Krasteva & Peter Tzanev, Kate Krolle & Maya Mikelsone, Domaš Noreika / ŽemAt, Alexandra Pirici, Elske Rosenfeld, Juliane Schmidt & Anna Till, SKILLS, VIP
Guided by the cultural technique of the “psychodrama,” SET #A reacts upon places in the former East and former West of Berlin to re-connect collective and individual trajectories of memory based on the figure of the ex-pioneer. The performances activate instants and gestures of historical and political discontinuity, emphasizing their transformative momentum. The participating persons, objects and architectures become representatives for not yet articulated, opaque experiences.
Please find the complete performance program on the District website.
Set #A is realized in collaboration with Galerie M and HAU Hebbel am Ufer.
Set #B: exhibition
Participants: Lina Albrikienė, Ēriks Apaļais, bankleer, Mitya Churikov, CORO Collective, Nicu Ilfoveanu, Wilhelm Klotzek & David Polzin, Marina Naprushkina, Claudia Rößger, ŽemAt
During the exhibition, objects, styles and words that were unnoticed, negated or simply unknown in the context of “post-Western” transformation will be collected and reconfigured as indexical traces. In order to understand the processes of historicizing the socialist / post-socialist experience beyond any mythologizing absorption, TFPM suggests new connections between that remote future and specific experiences of the present.
Set # B is complemented by the Appendix Collection, a research station with reference materials from the participants, the archive Jukebox Transitland: Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989–2009 (curated by Edit András and Margarita Dorovska) and the TFPM video archive with Lina Albrikienė, bankleer, Vlad Basalici, Eglė Budvytytė, Irina Botea, Cooltūristės, Anna Jermolaewa, Szabolcs Kisspál, Wilhelm Klotzek, Jumana Manna & Sille Storihle, VIP, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Katarina Zdjelar, a.o.
Set # B is realized in collaboration with Balassi Institut – Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (CHB).
Set #C: public seminar—”The Pioneer Camp of ReVision”
Participants: Ieva Astahovska, Nika Autor / Newsreel front, Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė / ŽemAt, [BLOK] (Ivana Hanaček, Ana Kutleša, Vesna Vuković), Ana Bogdanović, Sophie Goltz, Gal Kirn, Inga Lāce, Anchi Cheng & Kristina Leko & Jonathan Ryall & Lisa Schwalb, Rasa Navickaitė, Marta Popivoda, Anca Rujoiu, Ana Vujanović, Nikola Vukobratović, Madalina Zaharia and others
“The Pioneer Camp of ReVision” is a public seminar taking place from October 3 through October 5 and on November 20 at District and different locations in Berlin. It includes lectures, workshops, discussions, artist talks, performances and film screenings. In this context a revision of questions, concepts and terminologies of The Forgotten Pioneer Movement will be initiated. Co-organized by Zagreb curators’ collective [BLOK] and art historian Ana Bogdanović (University of Belgrade), “The Pioneer Camp of ReVision” addresses cultural theory ranging from the “presence of the absence” and the critical re-evaluation of socialist projects to the analysis of generational experience.
Please find the complete program on the District website.
Set # C is realized in collaboration with [BLOK] and the Latvian Center for Contemporay Art, Riga.
The TFPM Guidebook with essays and short texts by Ieva Astahovska and Ana Bogdanović as well as Daniel Falb, Ulrike Gerhardt, Susanne Husse, Andrea Caroline Keppler, Snejana Krasteva, Natalia Raaben and Anna Sabrina Schmid, published by Textem, Hamburg, will be launched on occasion of the project opening. One euro per book goes to the “New Neighborhood // Moabit, Free Initiative (Neue Nachbarschaft // Moabit, Freie Initiative)” for asylum-seeking people in Berlin Moabit.