EastUnBloc

EastUnBloc

Reclaiming Experimental and Subversive Media art Practices from Central and Eastern Europe, 1958 to the Present

Group exhibition

nGbK, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 11/13, 10178 Berlin

November 29, 2025 – February 15, 2026

Opening hours: Tue–Sun 12:00–20:00, Fri 12:00–20:00

Admission: free

35 years into the post-socialist transition in Europe, images of the “former East” are often still rendered in shades of gray. Only recently, Cold War scholarship is beginning to move away from a view of two monolithic opposing blocs, instead exploring the concept of alternate or parallel modernities rather than the idea of lack and lag in the former Eastern bloc. To add color to these images, explore the ruptures and permeability of the “Iron Curtain” and blast apart pre-conceptions, the group exhibition EastUnBloc presents subversive and experimental media art works and practices by more than two dozen artists and collectives from socialist and transition-era Central and Eastern Europe as well as the production contexts in which they were created. Beyond presentation, the exhibition seeks to reclaim these works, as “artistic intelligence”: inspiration and toolkits to respond to current challenges.

With contributions by: Andreas Broeckmann, CUKT, D'epog, Aleksandra Domanović, Davide Grassi (Janez Janša), Marina Gržinić & Aina Šmid, Gusztáv Hámos, Tereza Havlíková, Benjamin Heidersberger, Mike Hentz, Dalibor Martinis, Pneuma Szöv./TV Free Europe, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Sakrowski, Igor Štromajer, Vákuum Tv, Van Gogh TV/Piazza Virtuale and many others.

nGbK work group: Dušan Barok, Zsuzsa Berecz, Friedemann Bochow, Natalie Gravenor, Sarah Günther.

Funded by the German-Czech Fund for the Future.

Curatorial text

The five curators of the exhibition grew up in different countries along both sides of the former Iron Curtain. They experienced – firsthand or with the critical distance passed time allows – the social situation which shaped the exhibited works.

In Central and Eastern Europe, the late 1980s and early 1990s were marked by two intertwined paradigm shifts: the dissolution of state socialism and the dawn of the digital and internet age. This simultaneity brought about a diverse body of media works. EastUnBloc “reverse engineers” the underlying principles of these works and their production processes. Borrowing a term from computer programming, these principles and strategies are referred to as “scripts”.

They invite visitors to connect with the exhibited works and reflect their own past, future and present through the exhibits’ lenses.

Instead of insisting on a spatial, chronological or geographical dramaturgy, the scripts guide visitors to encounter works in an optional order, revealing themselves through color-coding and other clues in the exhibition design.

A cooperation with Wiki-based arts online library Monoskop provides background information throughout the exhibition.

A detailed annotation of the scripts follows.

Reality bending

hack the system with pranks and hoaxes

Analogous to the musical practice of circuit-bending – creative manipulation of circuits in electronic devices to get an output that was not intended by the manufacturer – the exhibition uses the term “reality bending” to highlight works that hijack power structures. Through parody, overaffirmation, or unexpected disruption, these works reveal hidden truths, empower the powerless (if only for a brief moment), and show that a different situation is possible.

While reality bending is a practice adopted for progressive and emancipatory aims, some works also deal with ethical questions and possible unintended adverse effects.

Media artists and activists in Central and Eastern Europe frequently used reality bending as an underlying “script”. Some works ruptured rigid and oppressive state media, in particular television, through illegal and high-risk actions or, as in the Slovenian art group Laibach, by parody or détournage of official symbols and messages. Others, like Krzysztof Wodiczko with his Lenin Monument Berlin, 1990, used media as interventions in public space.

Expose the seams

reveal media’s underlying processes

The persuasive effect of media often relies upon the audience’s ignorance of how it works. Official media in socialist countries also strived to remain untransparent. Particularly in the postmodern era, questioning the power of media by exposing its inner workings became key issues for scholars and artists on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Works using this script are highly experimental and self-referential, deviating the most from conventional viewing habits. The presence of the camera is highlighted by breaking the fourth wall or showing the recording apparatus. Editing, usually invisible in classical narrative cinema, is foregrounded. Some structuralist works explore the materiality of film and video: film grain, electromagnetic signals, video dropouts, pixels, and other digital glitches. Some works walk viewers through the process of creation.

Make your own media

empower yourself through media production

Bertolt Brecht famously said in the early 1930s, with the advent of radio as a mass medium, that radio not only allows one sender to reach a broad audience in a top down fashion, its technology also has the potential for each receiver to broadcast its own programming.

Then technologies such as 16 mm and Super 8 film emerged which could be developed at home – crucial particularly in Central and Eastern Europe to avoid state control through film labs. Later video formats such as VHS, Video / Hi8 and (Mini)DV became accessible, empowering more people to create their own media. Non-conformist self-expression, aesthetic exploration, and providing counternarratives to the dominant ones by sharing suppressed information were some of the aims of this practice.

In the strongly controlled media systems of the socialist era, alternative niches emerged. In state supported or tolerated experimental film and video art practices in Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania, abstract visual art works flew under the radar of censors who were watching out for explicit, often verbal artistic expression. Amateur films, which occasionally tested limits of form and content, were produced in clubs associated with worker leisure time and worker creativity encouragement or, as in Yugoslavia, as part of an aesthetic education project. Autonomous production occurred with available Super 8 film cameras and video equipment, sometimes smuggled from the West. This allowed the creation of a wide range of “audiovisual samizdat,” underground self-publishing practices ranging from experimental works which challenged aesthetic norms to documentations of suppres­ sed political movements such as Charta 77 in Czecho­slovakia and Solidarność in Poland.

This script also encompasses interactivity. While the audience is not completely autonomous, it is given a co-creating or at least decision-making option within the works, foreshadowing today’s media landscape of individual prosumers: The exhibition presents Kinoautomat, the first large-scale interactive narrative film from Czechoslovakia which premiered at Expo Montreal in 1967, and DemoKino, a 21st century response which explores interactivity and political decision making. This script also includes net.art works which use the interactive features of the internet browser and hypertext, as well as 1980s independent com- pu­ter games from Czechoslovakia, some of which had explicit political themes.

Turn shit into chocolate

use limited resources for maximal effect

Resources are generally scarcer for independent artists and activists, and that was certainly the case in socialist and transition-era Central and Eastern Europe. Combining available materials with ingenuity and imagination, the works applying this script are provocative, humorous and even trailblazing. They use lo res formats like 16 mm, Super 8 or VHS, U-matic low band and Hi8 video, basic video signals, minimal computer code, such as the kilobyte digital animations of the Demoscene, ASCII characters, and Flash animation. Found footage becomes raw material. Editing takes place in camera or with rudimentary cuts, or films are shot in one take. Props and sets are handmade; trash becomes costumes; minimalism becomes virtuosity. The “turn shit into chocolate” script echoes in for example the Dogme 95 manifesto’s creative restraints and permacomputing (see the accompanying program), a concept and community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology inspired by permaculture.

Bring friends

create communities and throw a political party

As authorities in Central and Eastern Europe often sowed suspicion to better control their subjects, friendship became particularly precious. It also was a means of resistance. Long nights in pubs engendered not only hangovers but also plans for artistic and political activity. Private social gatherings became informal art exhibitions, fashion shows, concerts, poetry readings, film screenings, and happenings. Circles of friends co-created and had each other’s backs, worked and lived together. Making art became a way of life. And despite mistrust of potential secret police informers, encounters with the unfamiliar – people with different backgrounds and life situations as well as new experien­ces – were welcome.

Works using this script document avant-garde fashion which irreverently used socialist symbols. Intermedia club culture, where music, media art, design, dancing and performance merged, became labs for social change or a safe space for expressing queer identities.

Space in time

forge connections across spatial and temporal boundaries

Geography and history, two intertwined manifestations of space and time, particularly shaped everyday life and states of mind in Central and Eastern Europe. As a result of centuries of armed conflicts and domination by foreign colonial powers, national borders were redrawn, impacting identities and power relations. With the establishment of the capitalist and socialist blocs in Europe after World War II, the Iron Curtain became a seemingly invincible barrier with a far-reaching shadow.

As a consequence, much artistic practice engaged with the ghosts of the past, alternative histories, utopias and dystopias and how they all merge or battle each other in the present. Art also facilitated cross border exchange. The projects in the exhibition, through networks of likeminded artists all over Europe, forged connections via the distribution of analogue videotapes through semi-official channels like Infermental. Others used TV broadcast and early internet technologies, as did Van Gogh TV / Piazza Virtuale, or created a dialogue between past and future selves. And Transcentrala, a video art work by Marina Gržinić / Aina Šmid, explores how artist collective NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) developed a theory of history and concept of a post-national world transcending borders. In 1992, the collective founded NSK State in Time, which inspired this script’s name.

Events

Opening

nGbK

Fri, 28.11.25, 6.00 pm

With an intervention by the art network Pneuma Szöv. (Budapest/Berlin) and special guests.

“Bring a Friend” – Early Night Show

nGbK

Sat, 29.11.25, 7.00–8.30 pm

TV Free Europe presents: A performance and time travel talk show by Pneuma Szöv. (Budapest/Berlin) and guests: Gusztáv Hámos, Mike Hentz and Benjamin Heidersberger. – Live at and from nGbK!