Grammar of Freedom/Five Lessons

In the summer of 2013, the curators of Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and Ljubljana’s Moderna Galerija began to discuss mounting an exhibition in Moscow of the Arteast 2000+ Collection, the first museum collection focused on Eastern European postwar avant-garde artists. As Kate Fowle writes in her introduction, Never before in Russia had there been an exhibition dedicated to presenting art from Eastern Europe in a way that integrated Russian artists into the story. Grammar of Freedom/Five Lessons begins an inquiry into the network of artistic influences in the former East. The show and the catalogue propose a grammar, or set of tools, that sheds light on how artistic strategies have created resistance to–or provided alternative commentaries on–a range of social and political situations. More than 60 artists and art collectives from Eastern Europe and countries of the former USSR are included, with works ranging from the 1960s up to the present day. Featured artists include Marina Abramovic, Geta Bratescu, Ion Grigorescu, Sanja Ivekovic, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Dan Perjovschi and Mladen Stilinovic, among others.