November 16, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Opening: November 15, 2024, 7 pm
Curated by Elena Malzew
Between 1978 and 1989, Michail Gorbachev, then General Secretary of the Soviet Union, addressed the American people in a series of New Year’s speeches, in which he expressed, among other things, his joy at the “solution to the Afghanistan question”. In turn, the then outgoing US President Ronald Reagan congratulated the Soviet people and welcomed the joint steps towards peace and prosperity around the world.
At the center of the exhibition Frohes Neues Jahr С Новым Годом З Новим Роком Happy New Year by artist and documentary filmmaker Jelena Jeremejewa is the eponymous 18-channel video and sound installation, which brings together New Year’s speeches by heads of state and government from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, and the USA from 1982 to the present day. The artist uses these condensed decals of past and present utopias as an occasion to reflect on the reverberation and multi-layered nature of political narratives from her migrant perspective at the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst. Jeremejewa questions the usefulness of political rituals in a divided world in which unity, community spirit, and solidarity are evoked more bitterly the more they are lacking in society as a whole.
If no common history exists that one could follow, if both the sender and the receiver of a message are radically different, if no shared knowledge and no shared resentment are possible, what forms can the common take at all?
The speeches by representatives of state power, which were once significant and intended to convey messages of continuity, new beginnings, and national unity, blend into an only partly comprehensible tapestry of sound–a multi-voiced polyphony that resounds in parallel. Although each speech, in itself, has clear references and ties to the historical context, the fragmentation and information density in the collage empties them of their context, the words enter into competition with each other, their meanings fade, and new meanings emerge all at once. A maelstrom unfolds of multilingual fragments competing for attention and appraising glances that literally do not let the listeners out of sight as they are drawn into a complex mesh of tributes and blessings, appropriations and consolations, encouraging appeals and hopeful anticipations. The walk-in installation, which serves as a time capsule, makes tangible the physical experience of the speeches and their embedded messages and political narratives.
Jeremejewa thus not only questions the power and significance of political rituals but also opens up a space of possibility where both the spoken and the unspeakable become explorable. Not only does it become possible to walk through this ritual, the abstraction of the future, the latent fear of it, but also the burden of the past and what remains of it–the dominance and penetrating nature of the one narrative that inevitably competes with others–are made sensually perceptible. The demonstrative power and the singular right to speak and attract the viewer’s attention are
dissolved here by the accumulation of speakers. The speaking heads of state are demoted and now find themselves in the reverse position, surrounded by an unmanageable mass of their peers. Both the flickering of the speeches, which increasingly turn into cacophony and noise and the consistent multilingualism make it difficult to listen. What remains is a tangle of empty phrases that are repeated year after year: “Comrades..., friends..., a difficult year..., peace and prosperity..., We together..., happiness and health in the coming year..., family...”. Templates that paradoxically are completely meaningless and powerful at the same time. The visitors assemble their own timeless New Year’s speech, their own sequence. The wealth of possible cross-connections remains incomplete and can only be grasped in fragments.
Frohes Neues Jahr С Новым Годом З Новим Роком Happy New Year thematizes the overarching change in political verbalizations of reality by showing how communities and spaces are dissolved and reconfigured through political rhetoric. Not only does what can be said and heard in those times shimmer through in them, but the image of a phantom community is also always created–a “we” that is sometimes addressed as a nation, sometimes as people, sometimes as a community of fate, which is being looked after, led, and controlled.
Program
November 15, 2024
5 pm – Guided tour through the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
7 pm – Exhibition opening, with keynote speech by Prof. Dr. Jan C. Behrends
November 30, 2024
6 pm – ‘Open Encounters’ with art historian, media scholar, and publisher Wladimir Velminski
December 3, 2024
7 pm – ‘Open Encounters’ with artist, activist, and feminist Marina Naprushkina
December 7, 2024
6 pm – Office Hours with the Minister of Empathy in the historic Capitulation Hall
January 5, 2025
Closing event
2 pm – Screening of Orlando – or a Little History of the Middle Class (2023), followed by a talk
between Jelena Jeremejewa, Catalina Flórez, and Dr. Beáta Hock
4 pm – New Year’s Feast hosted by Olga Monina
5 pm – Panel discussion with Dr. Darja Klingenberg, Lena Prens, Jelena Jeremejewa, and Elena
Malzew
Museum Berlin-Karlshorst
Zwieseler Straße 4, 10318 Berlin
Opening hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10 am –6 pm
Read more about the exhibition HERE
