Socialist Realism

Moving west--from Singapore to America, from New York to California--a woman examines the myth of "finding home" even as she comes to terms with its impossibilities.ibilities.

Socialist Realism Without Shores also addresses the critical discourse provoked by socialist realism - Stalinist aesthetics; "anthropological" readings; ideology critique and censorship; and the sublimely ironic approaches adapted from sots art, the Soviet version of postmodernism.

Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures' is the first published work to offer a variety of alternative perspectives on the literary and cultural Sovietization of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II and emphasize the dialogic relationship between the ‘centre’ and the ‘satellites’ instead of the traditional top-down approach. The introduction of the Soviet cultural model was not quite the smooth endeavour that it was made to look in retrospect; rather, it was always a work in progress, often born out of a give-andtake with the local authorities, intellectuals and interest groups. Relying on archival resources, the authors examine one of the most controversial attempts at a cultural unification in Europe by providing an overview with a focus on specific case-studies, an analysis of distinct particularities with attention to the patterns of negotiation and adaptation that were being developed in the process.

Bringing together the Soviet historical experience and Stalin-era art in novels, films, poems, songs, painting, photography, architecture and advertising, Dobrenko examines Stalinism's representational strategies and demonstrates how real socialism was begotten of Socialist Realism.

Workers Leaving the Studio catalogs the exhibition "Workers leaving the studio. Looking away from socialist realism," curated by Mihnea Mircan in the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana, Albania in 2015. According to Mircan, "The [...] exhibition reflects on another projection machine, whose history and consequences, unlike cinema, are circumscribed by national boundaries, specific histories, and ideological configurations. The regime of production and representation of socialist realism radicalizes the violence that the creation of a new image does to its subject: it intensifies the fraught relation between refashioned representation and that which is represented. Its insistence on a particular, projective notion of reality is commensurate with the coercion of daily - cultural, social, emotional - life into a grid whose perspective lines and vanishing points carry heavy ideological charges. It enforces what it represents onto that which it represents, so that representation would replace reality."Apart from a full documentation of the exhibition by photographer Marco Mazzi, the catalogue also features theoretical and art-historical contributions, both in English and in Albanian, on socialist realist art as developed in Albania under the communist regime, as well as texts highlighting contemporary attempts to display political realities through progressive artistic practices. Artists include: Santiago Sierra, Jonas Staal, Ciprian Muresan, Irwin, Sarah Vanagt, and Armando Lulaj, with scholarly contributions by -Artan Shabani, "Parathenie" // Mihnea Mircan, "Curatorial Note" // Raino Isto, "Sali Shijaku's Zeri i Mases and the Metaphysics of Representation in Albanian Socialist Realist Painting" // Jonas Staal, "Stateless Democracy" // Suzana Varvarica Kuka, "Nje kohe e shkuar ne themel te kohes sone" // Inke Arns, "The Nigerian Connection: On NSK Passports as Escape and Entry Vehicles" // Sarah Vanagt & Tobias Hering, "Disturbed Earth" // Alban Hajdinaj, "Ilustrimi i instruksioneve ose Gjigandi dhe Shkurtabiqi" // Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, "The Production of Hronir: Albanian Socialist Realism and After"

How did the Eastern European and Soviet states write their respective histories of art and architecture during 1940s–1960s? The articles address both the Stalinist period and the Khrushchev Thaw, when the Marxist-Leninist discourse on art history was "invented" and refined. Although this discourse was inevitably "Sovietized" in a process dictated from Moscow, a variety of distinct interpretations emerged from across the Soviet bloc in the light of local traditions, cultural politics and decisions of individual authors. Even if the new "official" discourse often left space open for national concerns, it also gave rise to a countermovement in response to the aggressive ideologization of art and the preeminence assigned to (Socialist) Realist aesthetics.