Vienna. »We are witnesses to a crisis of history«, writes Marina Gržini? in the catalogue for the exhibition by Isa Rosenberger in the Secession exhibition all. Three projects were shown in this venue, in all of which the artist also used the crisis-stricken nature of dominant historical narrations as an opportunity in the present and attempted to gain a grasp on the lacunae associated with historiography from the perspective of three women.
Taking their experiences and accounts of their lives as her starting point, the film »Nový Most« inter alia encompasses how she moves closer to the history associated with the eponymous bridge: the artist questions three women from the same family about their associations and experiences with the »New Bridge« built in the early 1970s in Bratislava. Ružena Dinková, the grandmother, recalls the celebrations when the bridge was opened, when the demolition of parts of old Bratislava for the construction project was all that cast a shadow upon the festivities, whilst her daughter also associated a kind of bridging and opening vis-à-vis the West with the striking cable-stayed bridge.
In the 15-minute film their subjective stories are linked with historic facts and also with certain myths: it was said that one general opposed construction of the bridge, as it was possible to look into the West from the panorama platform 80 metres above ground level, whilst looking back the grandmother remembers that initially the panorama cafe on the bridge’s only pier also used to revolve. Discussing the work with Barbara Steiner (exhibition catalogue) the artist explains that she was reliably informed during her research that the cafe never revolved and that the permanent change of perspective her grandmother remembered actually proved to be merely a collective fantasy that is still doing the rounds even today.
It should be mentioned here that the bridge was not the only way to look into the West in Bratislava in the 1970s: Jazmina Dinková, the granddaughter, talks of how the Austrian TV channel ORF, with the American series it broadcast such as »Knight Rider« or »The Beauty and the Beast«, shaped her view of the West and her mother also developed an idea of the West through television.
If one bears in mind that in the West virtually no-one watched programmes from the then Socialist countries, Judita Dinková’s assumption, namely that the way in which she and her compatriots imagined the West was probably not as far removed from reality as the images accumulated in the Western world concerning Eastern Europe, is probably fairly correct.
Although in her film Rosenberger does emphasise the subjectivity of remembered history, as a viewer one cannot help but see the three figures as representatives of Slovakian women.
We do not learn which criteria the artist applied in selecting the three, nor does the film provide information about their political attitudes, which, as is common knowledge, certainly play a far from negligible role when it comes to recalling history. This underpins the impression that these days the post-Socialist countries are an ideology-free zone, in which the political is one of the ills of the past.
Her photo series »Warsaw Nike« functions in a similar fashion; here she asked passers-by about the associations awakened for them by a monument to the victory of the Poles over the Germans in the Second World War. Although the people surveyed are a cross-section of old and young, men and women, ultimately one finds oneself confronted with clichéd commentaries here too, asserting that the Nike statue should be torn down and replaced by a modern sculpture, or that the menacing monument to the victors is viewed as a symbol for Warsaw’s current struggles.
The artist’s fundamentally feminist approach becomes rather more tangible in a participatory project she conducted together with the women’s centre in Wolfen. In the bygone days of Socialism this industrial city had the highest proportion of women in the workforce of the entire GDR. After the political changes in 1989 restructuring caused the loss of hundreds of jobs, which first and foremost affected women. In the exhibition a series of photographs drew attention to the fact that in the 1960s a statute depicting a »Female Chemical Worker« could still be raised onto a pedestal, whilst nowadays only a cube with nothing whatsoever atop it stands outside the deserted ORWO factory.
As part of the project »A Monument for the Women’s Centre (The Making Of) «, this vacant space was filled again, at least symbolically. In the film the worker who once modelled for the » Female Chemical Worker« climbs up onto the pedestal again. Rosenberger thus installed a monument in conjunction with the unemployed women organised in the women’s centre, drawing attention on the spot to the issues addressed by the initiative.
Parallel to the exhibition by Isa Rosenberger, who renders the often cited transformation process in the former Socialist countries more tangible via an investigation of the female workers and their problems, the Secession was showing a work by Miklós Erhardt focussing on the problems of a participatory approach.
His video installation entitled »Temporary Settings« takes viewers to Budapest, and thus once again to a post-Socialist country. The seed crystal for his video was a social research project on a housing estate on the outskirts of Budapest, which, built as it was in the 1970s, was called »Havanna« after the capital of Cuba in honour of the 25th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.
In a commentary by the artist, documenting the project on the sound track of the video, we learn that »Havanna« – like most housing estates in large cities – is tarred with racist urban myths: gypsy families are rumoured to have slaughtered pigs on their balconies or burnt parquet flooring to heat their flats. With a view to gleaning his own impression of the ghettoised neighbourhood, the artist rented a small commercial unit, which he first renovated and then opened up as an »Advice-Seeking Office «. The point of all these efforts was to establish contact with the people living in the district, who shared with him ideas ranging from trading in antiquities to drug-dealing or money-laundering, along with some more or less serious business ideas.
However, gradually the critical revision of his own »treacherous« (observer) position, which in the course of the project increasingly became the actual subject-matter of his work, grew much more important to the artist than these contacts, which were anyway rather superficial. Without turning viewers into his accomplices, the pictorial level of the video portrays a very limited slice of »Havanna« showing the view looking out of his shop, whilst the soundtrack comprises the artist’s very extensive account of his own failure.
Translated by Helen Ferguson