Multiple Realities gives a compelling look at subversion and surveillance behind the Iron Curtain
Alternately chilling and humorous, experimental art from the Eastern Bloc spans installations, photography, and eerie ice blocks at Vancouver Art Gallery
Curator Pavel Pyś at the opening of Multiple Realities.
An image from the series Trokut (Triangle), by Sanja Iveković. 1979. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Kontakt Collection, Vienna; exh. Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna
Vancouver Art Gallery presents Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc until April 21, 2025
A SENSE OF DANGER lurks beneath the surfaces of the expansive new Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Curated by Warsaw-born Pavel Pyś and organized by Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, the exhibition features more than 200 photos, installations, sculptures, videos, and a wide array of other works from Iron Curtain–era East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Throughout, the chill of artists grappling with surveillance and oppression—in many cases risking prison or their lives—gets under your skin.
Take Czech photographer Jan Ságl’s series of black-and-white photographs of an early-’70s apartment in Prague: the rumpled sheets of an unmade bed; a closet stuffed with clothes; a cramped bathroom with the toilet seat left up. While mundane on the surface, there is also an abandoned eeriness to them. And then you read that the series is called “Domovní prohlídka” (“House Search”). Ságl was documenting his lived-in home after a failed raid by secret police. Later, the photographer and his family packed up their belongings so the flat was empty when police arrived for a followup. The photos had to be hidden away by his friends for decades before they were shown publicly for the first time in 2012.
They’re juxtaposed in the show with a collection of Polaroid snapshots—again, of domestic scenes, jammed closets, unmade beds, and empty rooms. But this time, the shots were taken by the secret police—the Stasi, secretly entering East Germans’ apartments to record belongings in case there were suspicious changes. Artist Simon Menner later gathered them from a federal agency that made surveillance records available to the public when the “curtain” opened.
If one thing binds together images like these across the exhibit, it's the way they offer an avant-garde alternative to the Socialist Realism pushed by the USSR at the time. Courage and rebellion give a unique charge to these radical works that use everything from public interventions to jazz concerts to portraiture and even ping-pong tables to undermine the strictures of Soviet rule. As VAG deputy director and director of curatorial programs Eva Respini reminds us, Multiple Realities is not a show about life inside the Iron Curtain: “It’s exploring where, how, and why art should exist.”
Even when the pieces use humour, they carry a creepy unease. Polish collective Akademia Ruchu’s 1977 prank-performance film Stumble, projected on suspended screens at the VAG, is initially funny. On a crowded sidewalk, the artists pretend to trip, over and over, as unwitting passersby stop, assess, and laugh at the situation. But it’s a loaded act of subverting and engaging in a highly policed public space—right outside Communist party headquarters, curator Pyś points out during a VAG tour—and the crowds’ reactions betray the essential caution one needed to survive amid Poland’s climate of oppression at the time.
Other artists were forced to codify their messages even more. There’s barely a whisper of dissent in Romanian Matei Lăzărescu’s photo-real still-life painting Kitchen Table (1978), but Pyś draws attention to the telephone that sits on a kitchen table, its wire tangled around it. In this highly restricted Eastern Bloc country, it reads as a symbol of communication breakdown and a tool of surveillance.
Also included in the exhibition section titled “Public and Private Spaces of Control”, Sanja Iveković takes considerably more risk. Triangle, depicted through a group of photographs, is performed by the artist on her concrete, khrushchevka-apartment balcony in Zagreb. It’s May 1979, iron-fisted leader Josip Broz Tito’s state limousine is set to drive by, and all patios are supposed to be empty. We see the artist, in a hip tee and shorts, reading a book on class structures and pretending to masturbate; that provokes the alarm of a secret service agent spying from a nearby rooftop, and, rounding out the “triangle”, a policeman soon arrives at her door.
Polish artist Janina Tworek-Pierzgalska’s Miejsca (Places), 1975, tapestry, wool, steel (11 elements). Courtesy Central Museum of Textiles, Łódź.
In her post-wall 1993 “Stasi Series”, Berlin artist Cornelia Schleime can afford to be even more overt, making artwork out of her own photocopied Stasi file—acquired when the GDR fell and documents were made public. With each mundane typewritten observation she creates a photograph that subverts the boring surveillance notes: beneath one documenting how she stays home each evening, immediately closing her blinds when she arrives, she stands defiantly in a garden of red flowers, wearing oversized sunglasses and bearing her breasts in resistance.
Here, and so many other places in the exhibition, creative women are rebelling against the male oppressors who underestimate them. Again and again, the female body and sexuality are deployed in imagery of resistance. Janina Tworek-Pierzgalska’s Places, from 1975 Poland, depicts fragmented women’s body parts—feet, an eye, hands—via tapestry, a traditional female medium that was not as heavily censored as photos, sculptures, and paintings. The enigmatic textiles convey something akin to the fragmentation of the soul, speaking as much of absence as presence, laid across a room as rugs and furniture.
From this and other intricate handmade works we move a world away to the techno-experiments in “Looking to Other Futures: Science, Technology, Utopia”, a gallery section that alludes to the space race of the ’60s and ’70s, and the freedom that promised. On first look, Stano Filko’s Poetry on Space–Cosmos (1967-70) installation is a fun, retro-op-arty experience with curtains emblazoned with celestial circles atop a mirrored floor—as Pyś says, “Something between a maze, a disco dance floor and a spaceship.” But finished as it was in the aftermath of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, it also conveys wistful longing.
“It’s looking to the future, thinking of interstellar travel, but it’s made in 1970 when this artist was not even allowed to leave Slovakia,” comments Pyś. “It’s about lift-off when he couldn't even leave his own country—he wasn’t even allowed to go to Prague.”
Gyula Konkoly’s Bleeding Monument, 1969/2023, metal, ice, cotton wool, gauze, potassium permanganate, plastic sheeting, at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist
Disco mazes, tapestry body parts, and public pranks: there’s a lot to discover in these deeply researched, rarely displayed experiments from an era cloaked in so much secrecy that it’s still being understood. Viewers are helpfully guided along by timelines that situate the work in history. Most chilling of all may be how urgent its lessons are today—think right-wing nationalist forces returning to Eastern Europe, the invasion of Ukraine, and a surge in censorship and fights to control women’s bodies in the U.S. Multiple Realities offers a bracing look at art’s role in fighting the forces of control. “It reminds us of the ways artists throughout history have dealt with adversity,” Respini observes.
Of all the works, the one that is perhaps most haunting is the most direct. Hungarian artist Gyula Konkoly’s Bleeding Monument, conceived in 1969, a year after the Prague Spring, dares to say what so many other pieces in the show couldn’t in the time they were being created. In it, a melting ice block spiked with bloodlike potassium permanganate stains the gauze wrapped around it, slowly dripping over time in a tray beneath it. It is a clear, uncensored approximation of a bandaged, wounded body—anonymous and suspended in history, as disturbingly relevant today as it was in 1969. A shocking testament to “how, and why art should exist”. 
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