B EAST Magazine website

Feb 8, 2010

By Vijai

Reading the respected German weekly, Der Spiegel’s article on Europe’s Dying Nightlife this week felt vindicating. Time is so speeded up these days that Spiegel toeing the B.East line on Europe’s nightlife feels a bit like Galiloe living another 150 years to witness the Church finally drop its ban on a heliocentric universe. Even just five years ago, when we launched B.East, our contrarian views that the vibe in the East is punchier, sexier & fresher than the hyped scenes in Paris, Amsterdam & London was heresy to many. However, things seem to have gotten a lot worse even since then for a mainstream newsmagazine like Spiegel to crow out in its lead paragraph, ‘Europe’s nightlife is under threat and Amsterdam is no exception. Restricted opening hours, rent hikes and increased policing are all serving to dampen the party spirit in the Dutch article.’ The article goes even further, stating in a later paragraph that ‘Paris’ nightlife is on the brink of death.’

This is all sweet music to our beastly ears. Bohemian Rhapsody. However, there’s no reason to be complacent. Many of the cities in Eastern Europe have also been gentrified and sterilised since joining EU. There’s just a whiff of the zany, mad Prague in today’s picture-perfect Old Town. Riga & Tallinn have gone into hibernation and also restricted opening hours & embraced smoking bans and alcohol restrictions. The energy’s moving even further East, to Kiev, Moscow, Shanghai, Mumbai, and other places most people haven’t heard about. Which is why we moving East also, embracing the energy of the rising East in our future issues. B.East is going to be just about the East in future, whether it’s China or East London. We’re there where things are most raw. That doesn’t mean we’re abandoning East Europe. It’ll still be our primary base and the lens through which we view what’s happening elsewhere.

Stay tuned for news on our upcoming Black&White-out issue.

- by Alex Jackson

Eastern Europe: (failed) Russian Empire or extension of the West? Twenty years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Europe perhaps seems to have forsaken the right to be interesting as a geopolitical whole. What used to be the East’s defining factor, Socialism and belonging (or not belonging) to the Soviet sphere of influence, is what makes a revisiting of the region and its ideologies most interesting - at least to the artists being shown in Photo I, Photo You, the latest exhibition at London’s Calvert22 gallery.

Opened in May 2009, the cool art space just off Shoreditch High Street is the city’s first not-for-profit foundation specialising in and promoting Russian and East European art. Finally, London’s own creative eastern-bloc has a place to get its fix of Eastology.

The aim of this, the gallery’s fourth exhibition, is to trigger a double-take on the East of Europe, leading us to reconsider what is presented. “Most things in the world that we think we know, in fact demand a second glance,” explained  Moscow-born exhibition curator, Iara Boubnova. “The known demands attention just as much as the unknown,” she said. So nothing is here obvious, nothing is what it seems.

Getting us revved was Boris Mikhailov arresting Yesterday’s Sandwich 1960-70s series, featuring his signature superimposed photography that hybridizes the seemingly mundane into scenes imbued with fresh statements and complexities. Jan Mancuska’s The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all the parts of my body which I cannot see) 2007, not only blurs boundaries between author/subject/object but also questions the (un)known and the misleading tendencies in the obvious. Kiril Prashkov’s Responsible Painting 2006, of flaking apartment buildings presents an unofficial Utopian ‘alt-art’ while Olga Chernysheva’s peeping-Tom style video installation, Windows 2007, a meditatively exposes the beautiful banality of strangers’ lives beyond the curtains of an unknown tower-block - such as our favourite, a forlorn guy gazing from his kitchen before simply standing up, swigging from the kettle-spout and leaving the frame. Melancholy magnificence.

“This exhibition is about challenging our collective assuredness over what we think we already know,” said Boubnova. “It all comes down to the mission of art: to show us something that usually we don’t see. There is something about these artists and their works that helps to better define their subjects of interest which, in turn, helps understand and remember that we are now all together and not really divided by walls anymore. I think that each of the works confirms the existence of ‘others’ - whoever they are and regardless of East or West.”

Above right: Jan Mancuska; The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all the parts of my body which I cannot see), 2007; Developed photographic negatives, Perspex and MDF light-box, aluminium hanging rail Courtesy of the artist; West london Projects, London; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna.

Above: Boris Mikhailov; Photograph from the series Yesterday’s Sandwich, 1960s-70s; C-Print, 136 x 95 cm (framed) ed.5; Courtesy of the artists and Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris.

Photo I, Photo You runs until 28 March 2010

Iara Boubnova is the founder of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia

By Joel Alas, B EAST Editor

Like a twisted comic strip, or sketchbook doodles come to life, Budha Tomi’s illustrations crawl up walls and writhe across paper.
Budha Tomi is one of Budapest’s best emerging artists. He is at the fore of the city’s first generation of conceptual graffiti artists who have taken their form beyond juvenile street scrawling.
Though his art looks playful, Tomi is all about work. He studies five days a week at Budapest’s art academy, and in his spare time he paints, draws, and curates bodies of work. He doesn’t shy away from commercial opportunities, participating in several cross-over marketing campaigns. He drinks only red wine, and only a glass a sitting.
“He’s an amazingly hard worker. I can’t believe how much he does. Other artists talk a lot about projects, but he actually does them,” says Claudia Martins of Printa gallery-café-botique, where Tomi’s work is featured heavily.
Tomi loves to work in print. He publishes his own newspaper-style magazines, printing on cheap low-stock paper in black and white, in true Samizdat style. But lately he has become interested in a back-to-nature approach, etching on trees in forests and old brickwork in countryside buildings.
Tomi’s gallery space is a behind a graffitied shutter door on one of the many decaying streets of District VII, the Jewish District. It’s a tiny split-level room. Downstairs is where he paints, using canvas as his preferred medium. Up a steep set of stairs is where he stores the paintings, resting them against shelves full of old boxes. He opens one of the boxes to show us its contents – giant amber bottles of perfume.
Tomi’s studio is actually a storage space for a perfume importer who generously allows him to share the location.
We visit another studio space directly across the street. This one is occupied by Gabor Pinter, a painter who creates large canvas images with thick and full brushstrokes that create a blurring effect.
Gabor’s workshop is a huge vacated two-floor lobby, with a mezzanine level balcony overlooking the ground floor. He tells us it was once a “Jewish casino”. The building owner has allowed him to use the space while it awaits an unscheduled renovation. Until then, there is no power or heat in the building.
Gabor shows us his canvases in a pitch black room. I take a flash picture of each painting, then view them through the digital display. It’s a strange yet original form of exhibition.
Gabor and Tomi embody the opportunistic and motivated spirit of young creatives in Budapest, who are using the current pause in the development of their city to push ahead with their own vision of the future.

www.budhatomi.com