EastUnBloc Exhibition, Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin

29 November 2025 - 15 February 2026

Author

Adrienn Kácsor

Abstract

The article reviews EastUnBloc, an exhibition of media art from Central and Eastern Europe that centres on experimentation and political subversion to negate Cold-War era stereotypes about the Eastern bloc.

Keywords

media art, television, computer games, interactivity, exhibition, television news media, news broadcasting, experiential art, Dušan Barok, Zsuzsa Berecz, Friedemann Bochow, Natalie Gravenor, Sarah Günther

In 2019, Anca Parvulescu posed the question: “Does Eastern Europe exist?” (Parvulescu 2019: 470). A provocation par excellence, Parvulescu’s essay called for continued debate on the age-old problematics of “Eastern Europe” as a curious ideological construction regarding Europe’s “othered” margins. Parvulescu insists on reconsidering how “Eastern Europe” might still continue to operate as a productive methodological framework for undoing precisely the forms of epistemological violence that the term itself perpetuates. If, as Parvulescu suggests, “to study Eastern Europe is […] to attempt to write the phrase out of existence, to work towards its erasure” (Parvulescu 2019: 473), then how and to what ends can one still write about “Eastern Europe?”

EastUnBloc, an exhibition at Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), Berlin, showcasing experimental media art from Central and Eastern Europe spanning the late 1950s to the present, may be read as a compelling response to Parvulescu’s quest for “Eastern Europe as method”. The title itself deftly encapsulates the exhibition’s parallel motives: the playful disruption of some of the enduring Cold War-era stereotypes associated with the Eastern bloc of Europe, which unfolds concurrently with the assertion of intellectual and creative ideas, aesthetic methods, and political alternatives against global neoliberalism emerging from the region. Accordingly, the linguistic destruction caused by the conspicuous insertion of the prefix un- between the constituent elements of the term “Eastern bloc” serves as much as a force of negation as one of creative construction.

The exhibition is curated by a transnational and multilingual group of five art workers, including Dušan Barok, Zsuzsa Berecz, Friedemann Bochow, Natalie Gravenor, and Sarah Günther, whose collective expertise traverses both national and medial boundaries. Their creative curatorial concept transforms the gallery space into a hybrid between a construction site and a DIY art laboratory, with neon lights and coloured duck tape zig-zagging through the exhibition space (Fig. 1). Such curatorial marks render the exhibition’s own processes of production visible in the endearingly handmade style that the curators describe as their “artistic intelligence” – a concept that can be understood as a Central and Eastern European antidote of human creativity to today’s all-pervasive culture of artificial intelligence. In this sense, self-referentiality and transparency emerge not only as key themes, or, in the curators’ programming-inspired terminology, “scripts”, that run throughout the exhibition, but also as foundational curatorial methods. A similar doubling across themes and curatorial practice is evident in the exhibition's “script” of friendship and community. By following the pink-colored thread within the exhibition titled “Bring a Friend / Bringt Freund_innen mit”, visitors encounter a range of artistic practices that showcase communities and friendships as both sources of joy and means of political resistance and endurance in the face of hardships. This spirit of intimacy and community also enlivens the exhibition space through curatorial gestures such as the invitation to remove one’s shoes and instead change into colourful slippers available by a 1970s-style wooden furniture. Two small handwritten notes inscribed on the cabinet read: “FÜHL DICH ZU HAUS / FEEL HOME”, inviting visitors to inhabit the exhibition space in a manner that emphasises comfort and closeness.

One section of the exhibition that particularly reiterates a sense of home is the so-called TV Tower Lounge (Fig. 2), a slightly secluded corner refurbished with old sofas, dim lamps, and a tower of vintage TV sets, including a tele STAR 4004 from Leningrad and a Hungarian Jácint model. The installation, like the exhibition as a whole, offers a peculiar delight for those interested in media archaeology. The room reminds one of Nam June Paik’s work, yet instead of sculptural video installations, the TV Tower presents a rotating selection of shorts, documentaries, and experimental image and sound-based creations from Central and Eastern Europe. The screenings run according to the exhibition’s own preplanned and printed television schedule.

The exhibition’s television program includes Gusztáv Hámos’s stunning film essay titled “1989 – The Revolution on Television – The Real Power of TV”. The film offers a compelling reflection on the media revolutions of the former Eastern Bloc, including excerpts from Hámos’s interview with Eszter Tamási, an iconic news presenter on Hungarian national television during the socialist period. Reflecting on her own role as one of the primary faces of the socialist-era state media, Tamási recounts with pride her role among the pioneers of television news broadcasting in Hungary. Yet she recalls one particular moment in August 1968, when she was required to inform viewers that Hungary, along with the other Warsaw Pact countries, had invaded Czechoslovakia. In Tamási’s own words, she was compelled to look into everyone’s eyes through the camera and repeat a state-sanctioned narrative explaining why the Hungarian army had marched into Prague. The experience reportedly left her voiceless for weeks. Watching this episode today serves as a dire reminder about the contemporary state of propaganda and media across Eastern Europe. In several countries, including Hungary, publicly financed media continue to function as instruments of government propaganda, suggesting a continuity with earlier structures of political communication that complicates triumphalist narratives of the post-1989 transition.

The exhibition’s television programme (re)creates certain limitations for viewers, recalling the era when television audiences had to carefully plan their schedules in order not to miss a specific broadcast. Yet the curators also set free the experimental, subversive, interactive, and collaborative potentials of media art. An old-school overhead projector invites viewers to create their own projections on a small-scale replica of a monument to Vladimir Lenin, in effect recreating Krzysztof Wodiczko’s 1990 light projection, “Lenin Monument”. Originally erected in 1970, the nineteen-meter granite sculpture of Lenin by the Soviet Russian artist Nikolai Tomskii stood for two decades in the centre of Berlin’s Lenin Square, today known as United Nations Square. In September 1990, Polish-born artist Wodiczko transformed East Berlin’s emblematic sculpture of Lenin into a temporary monument dedicated to a Polish tourist engaged in a by then equally emblematic shopping tour through the city, pushing a cart laden with Japanese and South Korean electronic devices alongside packs from ALDI. The artist’s ironic transformation of Lenin from a monumental hero of communism to a pitiable emblem of post- communist consumerism elicited mixed reactions both at the time and in retrospect. Whereas Wodiczko's direct confrontation with the residents of Lenin Square in September 1990 is documented in the short film Every Monument Is a Person by Sabine H. Vogel and Mike Steiner, contemporary reflections on Lenin and the monument’s removal in late 1991 become momentarily legible when visitors take up the transparent foils and pens placed beside the overhead projector (Fig. 3).

Interactivity and playfulness run throughout many of the exhibition's installations, including the on-site studio of an experimental television channel called TV Free Europe, described by its creators as a “critical, satirical, and stubbornly optimistic medium” that not only speaks but also listens. Within a greenbox installed as a temporary studio for TV Free Europe, visitors can produce their own broadcasts and New Year’s messages. A wholly different kind of playground is offered by a computer station that allows visitors to play with Slovak computer games developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, now available both in English translation and in online playable formats. Such striking examples of innovative media art from Central and Eastern Europe also include Kinoautomat by Radúz Činčera and moderated in English by Alena Činčerová, widely regarded as the first interactive film that premiered at the Czechoslovak Pavilion of the 1967 Montreal World Expo. At nGbK, two visitors can sit together to follow the unfolding dark comedy about a certain Mr. Novák, who may or may not bear responsibility for the complete destruction of his apartment building in Prague. By pressing either a green or a red button (Fig. 4), visitors can repeatedly intervene with their own judgments about the endless moral dilemmas Mr. Novák faces, even though, as the narrative progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that their choices may ultimately have no meaningful effect on the film’s outcome. The work is a fitting critique of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, both in the 1960s and in the present.

Sarcasm, however, is not the only tool the region offers for confronting dysfunctional political and economic systems. Equally significant are resilience and a sense of collective responsibility for one another, qualities that can enable projects to materialise even under conditions of scarce resources and fragile infrastructures. Where there is a will, there is a way, as the English proverb suggests. Yet in Central and Eastern Europe, the various linguistic equivalents of this enthusiastic English maxim often carry a more visceral inflexion. For instance, “aus Scheiße Schokolade”, rendered by the curators as ‘to turn shit into chocolate’; “szarból várat építeni”, in Hungarian, ‘to build a castle out of shit’; or as in Russian, “delat’ iz govna konfetku”, ‘make candy out of shit’. Such idioms point to a regional ethos of the ability to improvise and produce cultural and economic interventions despite even the most adverse material circumstances. Yet the limits of such resourcefulness, especially in relation to the exhaustibility of human resources, are also acknowledged in the exhibition, as demonstrated by the 1992 project Piazza Virtuale by the artist group Van Gogh TV. Over the course of one hundred days, participants maintained an interactive television channel in the name of direct democracy, working day and night in makeshift containers installed in the public space of Kassel during documenta IX.

Finally, the region’s peculiar artistic armoury also includes humour, of a type that is lighter and more joyful than pure irony, and an unbeatable insistence on one’s right to imagination, which is manifest in a number of works, including Vákuum TV. The project proposes a simple gesture: in contexts where free press and television are constrained, a television frame can be fashioned from a sheet of paper or cardboard, allowing viewers to reframe the surrounding world through their own desires and interests. It is this combination of critique, humour, and a deliberately childlike impulse to see, play, imagine, and feel alive that makes Vákuum TV a timely artistic intervention today, resonant within Central and Eastern Europe and far beyond it too.

Overall, the exhibition subverts political stereotypes about Central and Eastern Europe as a dull totalitarian zone locked away behind the Iron Curtain and instead brings forth the region’s vibrant experimental art and media practices that have enabled the efflorescence of thus far little-known circulations, collaborations, and alternative political fantasies.

Adrienn Kácsor
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Bauhaus University Weimar
adrienn.kacsor@uni-weimar.de

Bio

Adrienn Kácsor is a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (2024-2026), where she is working on a research project on migrant art histories and completing her book manuscript on Revolutionary Accents: Hungarian Artists in the Service of Soviet Internationalism, 1919-1956.

Bibliography

J_HRIBERNIK_Self_Interview. 2020. TV Free Europe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAwqVBPv99U&t=59s.

Parvulescu, Anca. 2019. “Eastern Europe as Method”, Slavic and East European Journal 63 (4): 470-81.

Suggested Citation

Kácsor, Adrienn. 2026. Review: “EastUnBloc Exhibition, Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin, 29 November 2025 – 15 November, 2026”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 22. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2026.00022.421.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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