»If one has lived for some time in a particular culture and has often tried to find out about its origins and the way it developed, at some stage one also feels tempted to turn one's gaze in the other direction and to ask what future fate lies in store for this culture, and what transformations it is destined to undergo.« This is how Sigmund Freud begins his famous essay on the structure of symbolic rule, »The Future of an Illusion.« In the late seventies and eighties, this essay was often cited in connection with the debates about a new identity for Central Europe, an identity that was to be brought to life and nurtured by the turn-of-the-century spirit; at the time, such debates filled seminar calendars, exhibition venues, and the minds of intellectuals.

Significantly, after the Wall came down, this metaphor and the political and cultural concept attached to it seemed without motivation. Any talk of the other »Central Europe« was soon only of programmatic use at sentimental meetings of statesmen who did not really wield any power. The leftist political potentials (multiculturality, the affirmation of cultural hybridity, nonalignment, etc.) disappeared from the papers suspiciously fast when the realpolitical, neoliberal transformational energy turned to the West, to the EU and NATO.

The new metaphor of marginalisation, a metaphor of great cultural fascination that held intellectual and artistic networks together despite the destruction and rebuilding going on in the background and that helped mobilise forces in opposition to a market-driven »culturalisation« of the political and the levelling out of different experiences of history, was called Eastern Europe. This term was used to cover a number of cultural geographies that were scarcely comparable with one another and had experienced very disparate and separate historical developments. Sofia and Riga, Odessa and Prague gained new knowledge about one another, etc. The first cracks in this solidarity have begun to show since selected countries began negotiations to enter the EU, and it will be fascinating to see how long the explosive power of the reflexive intellectual discourse will continue to present itself as »Eastern European.«

Since the start of the nineties, the successor states of Yugoslavia have played a special role in this context. When the Eastern Bloc fell, European hegemonic geographies classed these states as part of Eastern Europe, although they had formerly tended to be assigned to the West, to the non-aligned states. And when the nationalist war broke out, the Western powers recalled the war slogan of the 19th century: Balkan. This is a word that has now unleashed counter-energies in south-eastern European regions - in the same way as the talk of Central Europe once did - and given rise to a new self-confidence in urban intellectual and artistic scenes that is based around a new regional cosmopolitanism free of nationalist resentment. Conferences like »Understanding the Balkans« in Macedonia, local biennials, magazines and a number of cultural exchanges based in new centres like Belgrade, Sofia, and, above all, Istanbul (which, as the central metropolis, has been included in the Balkan metaphor) contradict the clichés about the Balkans that are current in the media, in which the colourful films of Emir Kusturica amalgamate with the sounds of turbofolk.

ZKM Director Peter Weibel has directed his attention to this field and the widely differing attitudes associated with it elsewhere, as he has already done with regard to the new concept art at the end of the eighties and post-colonial aesthetic productions in the mid-nineties. In a large exhibition, this time aided by co-curators Eda Cufer from Ljubljana and Roger Conover from MIT Press, he has drawn a homogenising, teeming artistic landscape close by the cliffs of the colourful Balkan cliché, a landscape whose various aspects are often obscured by the sheer number of works. Nonetheless, »In Search of Balkania« is important, as the exhibition points up some still existent deficiencies in canonisation criteria and mechanisms of exclusion. In particular, the critique it provides of universalistic modernity projects and the functionalism of the post-war decades prevalent throughout the Bloc, which was developed parallel to concept art etc. in the cities of southern Europe, is something still lacking in many of the large collections and badly dealt with in the region itself.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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