Curators: David Crowley and Daniel Muzyczuk
Coordinator: Martyna Gajda
This exhibition explores the close and often dynamic relationship between visual artists and musicians in Eastern Europe under communist rule. In the 1970s stages became settings throughout the world for elaborate light shows, outlandish props and theatrical costumes. Entire fashions were generated from the ‘look’ of performers. And, later, in the 1980s, the music video provided a new platform for visual expression. After dismissing Western pop culture as propaganda in the early years of the Cold War, each Eastern European state set about establishing its own jazz, pop and rock scenes with compliant stars, controlled venues and censored music magazines.
The show will not be a documentary history of alternative music but will explore how the visual arts and music combined in these years. It will feature paintings, sculpture as well as films and documents (photographs, posters and printed publications).
Many of the works of art, improvised musical instruments and documentary records of performances will be exhibited for the first time. Notes from the Underground will address a wide geography including the republics of the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc and the former Yugoslavia. In these ways, the conventional history of intermedialism (most closely associated with Fluxus) will be expanded into new territories.
Exhibition talk with the curators [POLSKI]: