Political power relations, economic structures, and cultural ideas impact the way we experience, envision, and structure our environment. The Cold War, with its strict division between ‘East’ and ‘West’ both in physical and ideological terms, is a case in point. To a certain extent, Cold War history can be read as a history of spatial relations. This exhibition explores the spatial characteristics of Cold War era Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in ten sections: public space; private space; work space; border space; secret space; ideological space; alternative space; outer space; shared space; and changing space.

Photography exhibition by Nathan Farb, based on a trip he took in 1977 to Novosibirsk as a host of the American exhibition Photography USA, part of a cultural exchange program under President Carter’s administration. 

For the past ten years, British cultural historian Juliane Fürst has researched a topic that has never been consistently addressed before; the history and culture of Soviet hippies in the 1970s and 1980s. Hippies represented the most widespread and pervasive counter-culture in the Soviet Union. Maintaining an elaborate network between regional centers, they experimented with alternative life styles, liberating themselves from the constraints of imposed culture. The exhibition highlights the power of idiosyncrasy in the very heart of the socialist empire.