The Power Plant is pleased to be able to present Rearview Mirror this summer, a timely exhibition that brings together the work of a new generation of artists from Central and Eastern Europe. The exhibition will be produced as a partnership organized by the Director of the Power Plant Gregory Burke with Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Alberta Catherine Crowston and is guest curated by Canadian-born, New York-based curator Christopher Eamon. The exhibition looks to the past as well as to the future – as through a rearview mirror – the work of the 22 artists in the exhibition engage post-conceptual strategies and forms, and collectively challenge accepted
notions of Eastern Europe as a social, political and art historical monolith.
The exhibition is on view from 1 July through 5 September, 2011, and the opening party is set for Thursday, 30 June from 8:00-11:00pm, free to the public.
Gregory Burke notes the gallery is delighted to be collaborating on this outstanding project: “Chris’s exhibition is timely in aiming to alter stereotypes of Eastern European art and Eastern-ness in general in the post-socialist period. Together with our colleagues at the Art Gallery of Alberta, we are thrilled to provide a national reach to this important exhibition.”
Consistent with the large thematic summer exhibitions at the Power Plant, Rearview Mirror is intended for a diverse audience and addresses new voices and global positions within contemporary art. The exhibition contributes to the articulation of these new positions, specifically through Eamon’s investigation of a particular geographic, political, and artistically rich region.
Embedded within this project is a context that hinges on the legacies of conceptual art (both from the West and the East), the specific art historical study of the work from this region, and it opens up discourse around shifting post-conceptual developments. Rearview Mirror brings together the work of artists from diverse backgrounds and histories to look at the non-traditional practices of a younger generation of artists from the last decade, presenting an opportunity to engage with the practices of relative newcomers such as Cyprian Muresan, Gintaras Dzidziapetris, and Anna Molska in the context of some of their contemporaries already known through international art circuits such as Pawe¿ Althamer, Roman Ondák, and Wilhelm Sasnal.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a substantial publication featuring commissioned texts and co-presented by the Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Alberta.