This panel brings together six artists in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus who grew up in the former Eastern Bloc: Wojciech Bąkowski, Tigran Khachatryan, Ciprian Muresan, Anna Molska, Kateřina Šedá, and Jakub Julian Ziolkowski. Titled after an artwork by Romanian artist Ciprian Muresan, the discussion will examine the transformations that took place in Eastern Europe in the ’90s and that turned communist regimes into neoliberal systems. The panel will describe the end of the Cold War as seen by a group of artists who were around ten years old when the Berlin Wall fell.

In the last twenty years, the social and political climate in Eastern Europe has changed to such an extent that, to the members of the latest generations, communism might appear as a distant, fabricated myth, a fairy tale their parents had made up. “Communism Never Happened” will explore this tension between cultural amnesia and progressive nostalgia. Moderated by Charity Scribner.