The Future Museum Project: Discussing the Role of Gender and Avant-Garde in the Arts

Maxime Forest: In 2013, I came across an interesting volume titled “Gender Check: Gender, Art and Theory in Eastern Europe”, based on an exhibition at Vienna Museum of Modern Art (MUMoK). It compiled different texts regarding the relation of Eastern European artists and curators to gender issues, evidencing crucial East-West divergences. This book was the main driver for creating the course Gender, Politics and Avant-Garde in Central-Eastern Europe in 2014. Provided it was based upon an exhibition itself, the idea of turning the class into an installation or exhibition was already there, behind the scene. In 2020, I co-founded a gallery at Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, devoted to creative scenes from Central-Eastern Europe, which triggered the exhibition project with Sciences Po students. This was also the period of the COVID pandemic and both students and artists were stuck at home.

Why not reunite them beyond the screen, and explore together notions tackled in the course? After the full scale war broke up in 2022 in Ukraine, I felt this should expand to Ukrainian artists and curators and, at the end of 2023, the project was integrated into a broader programme, called Future Museum, funded as part of the Saison de la Lituanie en France 2024. This, and the creation of the Institute for the Arts and Creation at Sciences Po - which supports art interventions in our curricula, have been two impulses to complete the project with students, and to showcase it in different venues.

Maxime Forest: Art production - not only art objects but their conditions of production, is a social process, embedded into political and economic conditions of the time. Yet art does not only reflect those conditions, but contributes to shape them, through architecture, allegorical representations, official painting (as “peinture de cour” or socialist realism in the former Soviet bloc) or other forms of “official arts” supporting specific ideological and political projects. Religious art (and reversely, art prohibited upon religious grounds) is also deeply entangled with political conditions and of course, art canons and hierarchies reflect power relations among nations, notably over the colonial era. Yet art avant-gardes play a specific role: they anticipate crucial political developments, generating radically new forms of expression that break up with traditional styles. Those, in turn, tend to inspire political change either through providing a new visual language for the new era, often co-opted by new ruling authorities, or through undermining them with non-conformist art. Hence, arts are a topic for social sciences, as much as politics or economics.

Maxime Forest: The project was tightly linked to the course content, which approaches major political and social transformations in Central Eastern Europe since the middle of the 19th century through the lens of gender, using different forms of cultural avant-gardes - such as suprematists or constructivists in the 1910-1920s, surrealists in the 1920-1930s or nonconformist artists of the 1970-1980s as moments when gender, politics and arts intersect. Students were thus equipped throughout the semester with theoretical and historical references - also through presenting their own case studies in class, before being put in contact with interviewed artists and curators. The use of online interviews was dictated by the COVID circumstances as for the first batch of interviews, and by material conditions as interviewees were from 7 countries. Interview grids were developed by students after studying interviewees’ online profiles and works shown on their websites. They were reviewed to ensure the consistency of interviews in terms of themes covered and time, and students conducted interviews in full autonomy. Recorded interviews were later edited by Gabrielle, one of the students involved, on the occasion of a summer traineeship at Kolektiv Cité Radieuse, and another trainee involved to prepare the Saison de Lituanie. Edited interviews include snippets of interviewed artists’ video works and one of the approached artists, Canadian-born Armenian director Gariné Torossian, provided a self-made short movie rather than being video interviewed for the project.

Gabrielle Rennuit: I’m a student in the second year of the Master of Communication, Media and Creative Industries in Sciences Po, who graduated with the bachelor of Arts in political humanities from the campus of Dijon. I developed a passion for art and curation during my studies, and plan on starting my career in the cultural field in the near future. After attending the class of Maxime Forest back in 2022 on Dijon’s campus, I had the chance to do an internship in the gallery Kolektiv Cité Radieuse, going from theory to practice. Besides my missions, I had the opportunity to start working on the montages of the interviews. Those experiences fuelled my interest in the region, in particular Lithuania, where I went for my year abroad. My goal was to witness and understand the cultural differences and their impact on the artistic creation in the Baltics. Through this year abroad I developed a new prism of observation for the exhibitions and cultural events I had the chance to attend in the region, and the artistic encounters I made convinced me to stay involved in this project, even from afar.

Gabrielle Rennuit: Art cannot be separated from the historical context of a region and the social transformations that are brought with it. Central and Eastern European countries experienced important social, political, and cultural upheavals during the late 20th century, inevitably fuelling the avant-garde in those regions. This particular art movement has often been marginalised, just like the place of women in society. Linking the problematics of gender and avant-garde allows the development of new perspectives on how overlooked elements contributed to cultural and social innovations despite a context of repression. Women involved in those movements played an important role in resisting not only political repressive systems but also traditional gender expectations. Taking the “gender glasses” permits us to revisit and to have a new perspective of things that happened in the past to understand the production of the present. Thus, the intersection of gender and avant-garde creates a space both for artistic and social experimentation.

For instance, Lithuanian art has a deep conceptual dimension as people had to rely on symbolic expressions during times of occupation. The post-Soviet transition in the Baltic states was also a strange time without clear rules, which might have encouraged artists to create their own. The legacies of these avant-garde movements inspire and shape the practices of cultural professionals today in the region and the prism of gender is necessary to produce a nuanced analysis of those creations, with the understanding of the resistance they represent.