Bojana Pejic Livres

Following the collapse of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Bloc in 1989, gender studies and the theorization of feminism boomed in eastern Europe, from the Baltics to the Caucasus. Bojana Pejic's substantial companion volume to "Gender Check" (which compiled paintings, sculptures, photographs, posters, installations, films and videos by over 200 artists) offers a coherent picture of this previously unmapped terrain, analyzing the visual arts before and after 1989 in relation to the relative absence and then explosion of feminist debate. How were workers depicted on Socialist posters? How were male heroes" portrayed in officially sanctioned art in Romania in the 1960s? How did female artists see themselves during the transition period after 1989? How do images impact our view of the sexes? "Gender Check: A Reader" reflects on ideas of masculinity and femininity in the former Communist Bloc."

After 1989, a serious body of knowledge has been produced in the former socialist states as well as in the West that theorizes the notion of gender and gender relations established in state-socialism and in the post-communist era. However, the existing volumes rarely (if ever) pay attention to the construction of femininity and masculinity in visual arts. The Gender Check reader presents, for the first time, an extensive collection of texts that explicitly analyse visual arts created before and after 1989 in the 'other' Europe in terms of gender and feminist theories. Museum für Moderne Kunst Wien, 2010. Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2010.