THE VELVET CURTAIN: Curator’s Statement
The fall of the Berlin Wall crucially restructured not only global politics and economics but also the living conditions of millions of people in Eastern Europe. It brought about freedom of speech, a free-market economy, and freedom of movement that most Eastern Europeans had not dreamed of for several decades. It also led, however, to harsh social stratification that eventually resulted in economic decline and poverty for many citizens both urban and rural.
The two artists whose work is presented in this gallery are both participants in a group exhibition called Behind the Velvet Curtain: Seven Czech Women Artists, which is being shown at the Katzen Center at the American University in Washington, D.C., from April 2 through May 18, 2009. The exhibition shows works by seven significant Czech women artists who, with a variety of media (video, installation, photography, drawing), challenge mechanisms of power related to gender, sexual, ethnic, and national identity. The title of the show, Behind the Velvet Curtain, evokes the notorious concept of the Iron Curtain that signified the impermeable border around the former Soviet Bloc, and, at the same time, refers to the well-known cognomen of the political changes in former Czechoslovakia in 1989, the Velvet Revolution. However, both words—”velvet” and “curtain”—are commonly employed in a much less symbolic way; they literally mean fabric or cloth that is soft, often used for women’s clothing or in the home. The two words thus carry strong connotations of women’s space—the sphere of privacy, domesticity, sexuality, fantasy, but also of care-taking and luxury. And it is mainly in this context where intimacy and politics create an inseparable pair through which the exhibition is framed.
Martina Pachmanová
April 2009
