TIRANA, April 9 – At a finissage event held few days ago, artists and art lovers came together in a very pleasant setting and were offered a dedicated tour offered by the assistant curator Vincent van Gerven Oei to explore the uniqueness of a special exhibition combining socialist realism works from international artists and an exclusive selection of National Art Gallery collection.
Six internationally renowned contemporary artists explored the socialist realism period in Albania also known as the “Creation of the models of the New Man,” a genre serving the communist regime propaganda cultivated between 1960 and 1986, in a collective exhibition at the National Gallery of Arts.
“Workers leaving the studio. Looking away from socialist realism,” curated by Romania’s Mihnea Mircan featured works by Irwin (Slovenia), Armando Lulaj (Albania), Ciprian Mureşan (Romania), Santiago Sierra (Spain), Jonas Staal (Netherlands), and Sarah Vanagt (Belgium), as well as an exclusive selection of works from the collection of the National Gallery of Arts.
“This exhibition is an attempt to articulate specific fragments of the collection at the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana and contemporary art projects whose concerns revolve around the notion of realism,” says Belgium-based curator Mircan.
“It works through two hypotheses about the realism of socialist times, the two ways in which that discourse did not end. The heroic drive in those images, banishing metaphor but having it return as Freudian slip, undermines and corrodes their realist aspirations, and deflates the mimesis of a world ‘to come.”
On the other hand, the relations between artistic freedom and political subservience that underpin socialist realist art production radicalize an equation that contemporary engaged practices must also respond to, even if within a different regime of political interlocution.
The exhibition organized by the National Arts Gallery and the Department of Eagles remained open to the public from February 27 to April 5.
The Department of Eagles was established in Tirana in 2011 as a weekly reading group bringing together students and scholars from diverse disciplines in an attempt to reinvigorate the discourse of the “liberal arts.” Over the last years, this interdisciplinary group has developed into an independent project bureau for artists and thinkers in and beyond Albania.
Socialist realism
Socialist realism artworks have attracted huge attention recently after some of them were selected to showcase in the premises of the government residences.
“The major part of the National Gallery’s collection belongs to socialist realism. I have noticed that all collectors and curators show special interest in this period, because not everybody has had the luxury to experiment or touch it,” says Artan Shabani, the director of the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana.
“The majority of visitors are very curious to see what happened those years in the language of art, attempts to challenge time and getting out of the frames, formalism etc,” Shabani has said.
The Socialist realism genre started in the early 1960s with the return of Albanian artists graduated from East European art schools.
The art of this period is entirely propaganda, serving the interest of the political regime in power. “Based on clichés imported from its originating place, the former Soviet Union, this art focused on the workers and their actions, transforming them into ‘myths’ of the period. In fact, socialist realism does not try to show openly and truthfully the daily aspects of the reality of the working class, but strives to erect and establish the socialist working activity as some sort of a cult while placing the common worker as the main character of a ‘new epoch’,” says the National Gallery about the permanent socialist realism pavilion.
Noted artists who have developed significant works in this genre included Kristaq Rama, Muntaz Dhrami, Zef Shoshi, Pandi Mele, Myrteza Fushekati, Petro Kokushta, Çlirim Ceka and many others.
. Workers leaving the studio – Looking away from socialist realism
Film begins in 1895, when female workers exit the factory and walk in front of their employers’ camera, pacing the space of the frame quickly to keep up with the reel’s running time. “It’s the invention of a new physics, operating by the pressure of time spans on the body, by the condensation of space within the frames”: the act of producing new rhythms for new bodies. Cinema is to do with representation, but also with a “morphological inflection, resulting from the meeting between the rotating metal teeth of a machine, the reaction time of silver salt and the body of a worker.”
The present exhibition reflects on another projection machine, whose history and consequences, unlike cinema, are circumscribed by national boundaries, specific histories, and ideological configurations. The regime of production and representation of socialist realism radicalizes the violence that the creation of a new image does to its subject: it intensifies the fraught relation between refashioned representation and that which is represented. Its insistence on a particular, projective notion of reality is commensurate with the coercion of daily – cultural, social, emotional – life into a grid whose perspective lines and vanishing points carry heavy ideological charges. It enforces what it represents onto that which it represents, so that representation would replace reality.
Regardless of differences between national variants, the main ones being propagandistic intensity and iconographic proliferation, socialist realism glorifies labor, and – directly or obliquely – the power in whose service labor toils. To return to the project’s title, workers are symbolically locked up in the factory, fabricating, hammering away, chiseling and polishing new realities: an exit from history through communism’s triumph. Artists, on the other hand, leave the studio and immerse themselves in this social landscape of permanent productivity (or, alternately read, in a brutal world of faceless collectivism), both capturing and visually formulating the process.
This exhibition is an attempt to articulate specific fragments of the collection at the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana and contemporary art projects whose concerns revolve around the notion of realism. It works through two hypotheses about the realism of socialist times, the two ways in which that discourse did not end. The heroic drive in those images, banishing metaphor but having it return as Freudian slip, undermines and corrodes their realist aspirations, and deflates the mimesis of a world “to come.” On the other hand, the relations between artistic freedom and political subservience that underpin socialist realist art production radicalize an equation that contemporary engaged practices must also respond to, even if within a different regime of political interlocution.
Socialist realism did not prevail over art-historical conventions, while the political complicities that propelled it might have something to say about – and to – contemporary art at large, bring a corrective to its claims of emancipation and engagement. Though often disavowed as naive within artistic discourse, the relation between visual language and economic and political hegemonies as constantly emphasized in socialist realism remains a fact to this day, in spite of the many continually renewed claims to art’s autonomy; an autonomy that can only be maintained precisely because of the economic and political structures that profit from art’s image as autonomous. Socialist Realist art was never able to internalize the revolutionary changes in political and social life it was expected to depict, nor was it able to withstand that shock wave of liberalization that obliterated them. A social realist art “to come” is a renewed articulation of the links between art and politics, between the impossibility of art’s autonomy and the impossibility of its impotence. (Department of Eagles)
