Ostalgia, The New Museum, New York, July 14-October 2, 2011

The narrative of nostalgia defines the exhibition Ostalgia, an unconventional survey of more than 50 artists from various countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics, whose "main protagonist," states curator Massmilano Gioni, is "the overarching ideology of Soviet Socialism." The show's title is taken from the German word Ostalgie or "nostalgia for the East" that emerged in the early 1990s to describe a longing for Germany pre-unification, and later elsewhere in Eastern and Western Europe as a collective mourning for the communist past...