Artists

Geta Brătescu, Paweł Kwiek, Barbara Kozłowska, Jürgen Klauke, Krzysztof Niemczyk, Edita Schubert

Press release

Sometimes if a story from the past needs to be told, it will find its own way to reach the present, to resonate with our here and now. But stories need to be persistently sought out, their linearity reconstructed, the paradoxes they contain heard, to find an audience, to be known, sometimes for the first time, even though years may have passed since they happened. All this time, the story may have remained silent, only to suddenly find itself, appear, be heard, change something just by having happened.

You Will Hear When You See Me  is an exhibition of self-portraits created in various Central and Eastern European countries in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired not so much by a desire for self-memory as to build and mark the artist’s place in a particular context, and through this gesture, to loosen the norms and rules that created it. By marking their presence, by documenting it, by the brute fact of recording their being, artists from this part of the world defined, built and constructed their subjectivity. In the creative process they often had to face the mechanisms of censorship, sometimes in a milder form, but sometimes they worked in the context of an extremely oppressive regime, where even the mere painting of their own image could become grounds for persecution.