Artistic Interpretations of the Cold War

Artistic Interpretations of the Cold War presents art installations by Jennifer Vanderpool, Farrah Karapetian, and Dutch artists Richtje Reinsma and Daphne Rosenthal. 

Jennifer Vanderpool’s Piter evokes the city of Leningrad and emphasizes the return in 1991, during perestroika, to the historic, pre-revolutionary name Saint Petersburg. Piter will include new work by Vanderpool, historic films, interviews with Russian immigrants who relocated to Los Angeles, and works Vanderpool selected from the Wende’s collection. Vanderpool recently exhibited Super Natural at the National Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow, and participated in Collecting Geographies—Global Programming and Museums of Modern Art at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She was a HOTHOUSE 2015 UCLA /Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance artist-in-residence. 

Farrah Karapetian presents Nothing Comes Between Me and Me Between Comes Nothing. Her installation includes some of the museum’s collection of jeans from the GDR and the Soviet Union, displayed according to the posture of Brooke Shields’ famous Calvin Klein advertisement: reclining with her body forming the company’s logo, CK. Karapetian will also exhibit a cameraless photographic work that contends with the original image of Shields’ denim-clad legs. The title of the installation departs from CK’s original advertisement of 1981, “Nothing Comes Between Me and My Calvins,” and emphasizes the circularity of desire and satisfaction before and after the end of the Cold War. Farrah Karapetian’s upcoming exhibitions include A Matter of Memory, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York (2016), and About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2016). Her work was recently included in Charlotte Cotton’s Photography Is Magic, published by Aperture (2015), and has been most recently reviewed in Artforum, the L.A. Times, and Camera Austria. With a grant from CEC ArtsLink, she will reside in Saint Petersburg, Russia, during May 2016.

Dutch artists Richtje Reinsma and Daphne Rosenthal (under the name of artist collective DRR) worked as artists-in-residence with everyday objects from the collection of the Wende Museum for their project Free Things, which examines the various ways ordinary objects and technologies shape our imagination, behavior, relationships, and memory. On display are three new works about telephones: a drawing triptych, a sculpture, and a video. Free Things was generously supported by the Mondriaan Fund.

Explore Online Catalogue