Past
The exhibition Facing the Wall: Living With the Berlin Wall reflects upon larger issues of the human impact of the Cold War and the activities, behaviors and opinions of those living in those tumultuous times. It traces the personal stories of four individuals: a West Berlin wall painter, Thierry Noir, an East German border guard Peter Bochmann, a day visitor from the West Alwin Nachtweh, and a former East German Stasi officer Hagen Koch. Exploring the complex, interconnected and often contradictory nature of history seen through the lenses of these four individuals living at the Wall, this exhibition recreates the place where the realities of political ideology and personal experience came face to face.
Join us for the third installment of our discussion series as The Wende Museum invites contemporary artists to share their ideas about how the past gives meaning to the present. Chief Curator Joes Segal will moderate an interactive conversation with artist Ken Gonzales-Day and art advisor and independent curator Brenda G. Williams as they consider how interpreting the past informs the present.
The second installment of our discussion series as The Wende Museum featured contemporary artists sharing their ideas about how the past gives meaning to the present. Chief curator Joes Segal moderated an interactive conversation with filmmaker Bill Ferehawk and writer Katya Tylevich as they considered what it means to make art in times of irreconcilable alternative truths.
Museums present their knowledge to a wider public. But what is the basis of this knowledge? Normally, visitors are not aware of the questions, issues, discussions and disputes behind an exhibition concept or even a simple wall text. In this case, artworks from the Wende collection are interpreted in different, often contradictory ways.
To understand the realities confronting us, we need historical and artistic reflection. In the first installment of a new discussion series, The Wende Museum invited contemporary artists to share their ideas about how the past gives meaning to the present. Chief curator Joes Segal moderated an interactive conversation with contemporary artists Farrah Karapetian and Christopher Wyrick as they considered what it meant to make art in times of irreconcilable alternative truths.
The Wende Museum's Audiovisual Archivist KateDollenmayer presents a free film screening at UC Santa Barbara's Art, Design, & Architecture Museum. A selection of short educational films and animation from East Germany and Czechoslovakia accompanies the exhibition Fair Trade (on view through April 30th) by Los Angeles artist Bari Ziperstein, highlighting the materials, processes, and aesthetics of everyday life during the Cold War.
On November 12, 2016, an Embassy of the German Democratic Republic officially represented the perished East German state in Los Angeles for four hours.
Three Los Angeles-based contemporary artists with personal ties to Cold War Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union will be invited to design a multimedia installation at the Wende Museum’s exhibition galleries.
Developed in close collaboration with the El Segundo Museum of Art and its Chief Curator, Bernhard Zünkeler, this exhibition presents objects from the Wende collection relating to central planning in Eastern Europe in conjunction with artworks from the collection of ESMoA.
Justin Lifflander has lived and worked in Russia for nearly thirty years. He started in 1987 in Moscow as a driver-mechanic at the US embassy, then served as a missile inspector on the INF treaty in Votkinsk. He was an executive with Hewlett-Packard for two decades, after which he became business editor of The Moscow Times newspaper. His memoir, How Not to Become a Spy: A Memoir of Love at the End of the Cold War, was published in English in 2014 and in Russian at the end of last year.
An illuminated lecture performed by Yelena Zhelezov and Kate Dollenmayer, COLD WORM (time, auto-corrected) is a presentation of slides and films from the Cold War archives of the Wende Museum, projected in their original formats.
Netherlands-based and Romanian-born performance artist and theatre-maker Ioana Tudor will present “About how my emotions were stolen by the machine. While I was just sitting there, reading about my father,” in response to the exhibition Facial Recognition.
A lecture and Q&A by A. Ross Johnson, with an introduction by German Consul General in Los Angeles Hans Jörg Neumann