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 Al Jackson

In a city gripped by recession tighter than most, precocious good-time guys are urging the youth of Budpest to get out, get happy and get partying.

Bence Meyeri, the brain behind Wacky Parties, who together with Andras Eichstaedt, Janos Prorok and Matyas Lendvai of serial party/production/DJ crew Sick As A Dog, have been throwing dynamic pop-up guerilla raves in the metro stations, underpasses, and abandoned buildings of Budapest for the past year.

The likely lads recently hosted iLLFEST, a libertine mid-January weekender who’s first night took place in the concourse of the Astoria metro station. Chosen precisely for the heavy footfall of Friday night revellers traversing busy Karoly Kut avenue, attention was guaranteed and the minimal tech-house pumping from a makeshift DJ booth of trellis tables and ironing boards outside a news kiosk managed to attract quite a crowd.

After a couple of hours, the 100-strong party halted as the power (jacked straight from an outlet in the wall) failed. Perplexed cops looked on while Plan B seamlessly clicked into action and the throng was whisked to a club where the tunes continued to spin.

Hitches and glitches though are simply par for the course for Bence and the boys. Indeed, they seem to revel in the off-the-cuff ethic of what they’re doing. Importantly, the party goers are all plugged-in to the same attitude too and are eager to be part of it.

It’s just as well ‘cos Saturday night’s installment, in a freezing underpass off Ferenciek Square next to Erzsebet Bridge, was hit-up by the riot squad. As tear gas brought an end to a party that, Budapest’s likely lads at the helm, was thriving on its ’stolen moments’ vibe, it was a case of grab a lap-top, korg or ironing board and leg it to the van a few streets away.

However, this being a more focused, recession-era, Budapest, the 200 souls who had been waiting for this all week, or had simply stumbled across it and liked what they saw, were defiant. They were not ready for the authorities to kill their weekend (in addition to their economy). Not even at two thirty in the morning.

Again, exit strategies were already in motion and iLLFEST rumbled on in the eclectic Tuzrakter Cultural Centre. The squat-like former school building an inspired choice to sustain the hi-NRG D.I.Y. fun and keep us hedonists drinking and dancing well into Sunday.

In these troubled times it’s heartening to see that Andras, Matyas, Janos, Bence and associates, are throwing down the gauntlet: underground in Budapest, it’s invention vs recession and it’s kicking off.