It was 1983, and East German artist Gabriele Stötzer was being watched. She had already spent a year in prison, and the Stasi, the East German secret police, shuttered her underground gallery. But this new level of being watched played out in her photo series in which she documented a person who went by the name "Winfried" and posed for her in women's clothes, sometimes shyly, but other times provocatively. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, she discovered that he, "Winfried," was a Stasi informant.
"He knew that she was close to musicians and punks, and he approached her," said Walker curator Pavel Pyś. When she found out he was an agent, it raised the question: "Who is looking at whom? Is Gabriele Stötzer looking at him or is he actually observing her? It's totally wild that a spy would commit to this extent."
Stötzer's photographs are among about 250 works in the massive exhibition "Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-1980s" at the Walker Art Center. Organized by Pyś, the show casts the spotlight on how artists have navigated, at times seriously, at other times playfully, during this notoriously restrictive period.
"I think that when you say 'Central Eastern Europe during the Cold War behind the Iron Curtain,' images that come to mind might be of coldness, concrete, inability, isolation, a kind of drab image of homogeneity," said Pyś. "And this exhibition really does not tell that story. It tells the story of a great diversity of experimentation, of adventurousness, a spirit of trying to extend the possibilities of art."
Enter the bloc
Artworks in this ambitious exhibition, which Pyś worked on for five years, come from the former Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and are organized into four thematic sections: public vs. private, identity, community and the future.
In Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu's project "Electoral Meeting," 1975 (printed 2023), he used a hidden camera to photograph an electoral meeting in Bucharest on March 6, 1975, organized by the Communist Party. At the meeting, people were expected to support Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime; the Securitate secret police swarmed the scene, creating a sense of political theater.
In Croatian artist Sanja Iveković's photo series "Trokut (Triangle)," 1979, she documents herself sitting on the balcony, reading a book, smoking, pretending to masturbate, and even wearing a T-shirt in English — all subversive actions or attire — as party leader Josip Broz Tito, former president of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, passes on the street below.