28.07 – 28.10.2016 The Kids Want Communism, Second Installment, Curator: Joshua Simon / MOBY – Bat Yam Contemporary Art Museum, Bat Yam / Artists: Nir Harel, Ohad Meromi, Noa Yafe, Nicole Wermers, Jonathan Gold, Micah Hesse, Israeli Communist Party Archive, Praxis School, Nabil Maleh, Piyasiri Gunaratna, Nosratollah Karimi, Anna Lukashevsky (The New Barbizon), and Raanan Harlap. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1990 was the moment when capitalist democracy triumphed over the socialist police state. Since then, we can see how two elements of these opposing forces joined together in creating a capitalist police state. Socialism and democracy was abandoned in view of a reality in which the Soviet Union no longer existed. In the absence of the persistent challenge presented by the very existence of the Soviet Union, the reality of the welfare state has worn thin. Now, the procedural democracies in which we live, suspend liberties at all times, and shed the liberalism they prided themselves on during the Cold War. This way, the split in the center of our political lives is shaped in light of the tension between capitalism and democracy.
The incessant wallowing in the collapse of the Soviet Union, which continues until this very day, is expressed in Soviet Haifa — a series of paintings by Anna Lukashevsky in which she responds to her fellow New Barbizon group members, who in the first installment of The Kids Want Communism presented works they painted as children growing up in the Soviet Union.
Anna Lukashevsky 