The Contemporary Art Society and Its Enemies, or, The High Tide of Prophecy and the Promise of Autumn
Raino Isto, University of Maryland / American University
Overview
Abstract
In 1992, the Soros Foundation co-organized (with the Association of Independent Painters) the National Exhibition of Contemporary Albanian Painting, titled Autumn ’92 (Vjeshtë ’92). The title of the exhibition cannot help but be read against one of the most famous exhibitions held during the socialist era in Albania, the Spring exhibition first held in the early 1970s and more recently re-instituted in 1989, to significant critical discussion in the field of visual arts. The seasonal shift indicated by the naming of the Soros-funded exhibition promised a broader shift, one that would become even more direct by the close of the 1990s, with the Soros Foundation’s support of another exhibition, Ri-Orientation (Ri-Orientim), presented in 1997 with the support of Donika Bardha and curated by Edi Muka in the premises of the former Porcelain factory.
What were the stakes of this re-orientation, and what new art forms (and new art infrastructures) did this seasonal shift propose in the Albanian context? This paper sets out to investigate these questions, and more specifically to investigate a broader question. The actions of the Open Society Foundation and the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (or SCCAs) have often been discussed (in recent studies by Octavian Esanu and Aaron Moulton, for example) as bringing “contemporary art” to Eastern Europe in the so-called era of “transition”. Esanu in particular has traced the intellectual trajectory of Soros’ investment in culture as a key aspect of the “Open Society” proposed by Popper, and has suggested that “contemporary art” was in fact as much an institutionally defined phenomenon as an aesthetic one, and its institutional form was defined by the importation of neoliberalism into the former socialist world. Here, I am interested in investigating what kinds of definitions of “contemporaneity” were brought into the Albanian context, in particular through the events and discourses promoted by Soros’ foundations. While Albania did not have a dedicated SCCA (and was one of few East-Central European countries not to have one), it is nonetheless clear that many of the institutional transformations wrought by the SCCAs in other countries were also brought into the Albanian context during with 90s decade, by the Soros Foundation and other funders/organizers.
At the same time, however, I remain mildly skeptical of the arguments put forward by authors like Esanu, who envision the institutional and discursive system put in place through the Soros centers as something radically different from earlier models of culture. As such, I would like to provide a lightly longer history for the idea of an institutional history of “contemporaneity” in art, to consider some of the similarities between socialist-era exhibition-making and the discourses that were promoted during the 90s, to see if there are also meaningful strands of continuity between them.nach oben
Introduction to the speaker
Raino Isto is an art historian, editor, artist, and curator currently based in Alexandria, VA. They are currently editor-in-chief at ARTMargins Online, and a member of the editorial board of ARTMargins print journal. They are a lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park, and American University, Washington D.C. Their work has been published in Art History, Third Text, RACAR, ARTMargins, the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, Open Philosophy, The International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity, International Labour and Working-Class History, and The Getty Research Journal.
Raino Isto received their PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park, where their dissertation focused on the development of monumental sculpture in postwar Southeastern Europe, and the continuing resonance of socialist monumentality evident in the work of contemporary artists responding to the recent past.
From 2016 to 2018, Raino was coordinator and curator at the Stamp Gallery, the University of Maryland’s premier contemporary art space. They are currently working on a book about realism, engaged art, and the global Cold War in postwar Albania. They have curated multiple exhibitions, including Pleurad Xhafa: Irreconcilability as an Act of Love (2022) at ZETA Contemporary Art Center, and False Monarchy (2018) at the Stamp Gallery, University of Maryland, and co-curator of Unto Itself: Kameelah Janan Rasheed (2017) at the Herman Maril Gallery, University of Maryland. Raino also has published several catalogue essays on Albanian postwar art, and worked as a consultant on a municipal public art plan for Tirana. They are a founding member of the Laboratory for Albanian Art and Culture (LACA). Email: Risto@umd.edu.