ABSTRACT
This chapter presents analysis of four exhibitions curated from museum collections. These are: Difficult Choices at Kumu, the headquarters of the Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn; Reality Bites at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma in Helsinki; The Other Half of the Sky at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest; and Die Kunst ist Super! at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fur Gegenwart in Berlin. The chapter describes the ways in which the museums’ particular narratives participate in broader operational logics and how they act within their current political contexts. The museum’s role was to act as the populariser of Socialist realism and the ideas that it manifested. Art historian Piotr Piotrowski has analysed Kumu’s narrative as part of his investigation into the Eastern European narratives of the past. The way that biographical information about artists is given by the museum’s wall-texts is necessarily fragmented.
