Shadows of Socialist Realism Memento Park

The mouth can have so many meanings. The word it speaks, whether good or bad, the language it expresses, a non-verbal action like a grimace, a bite, a spit, a wry smile of fear, or a sardonic laugh...

Anna Neizvestnova’s project Shadows of Socialist Realism is a gallery of portraits, or rather fragments of faces, smiles, and mouths of the participants in the First Congress of Soviet... Show more

The mouth can have so many meanings. The word it speaks, whether good or bad, the language it expresses, a non-verbal action like a grimace, a bite, a spit, a wry smile of fear, or a sardonic laugh...

Anna Neizvestnova’s project Shadows of Socialist Realism is a gallery of portraits, or rather fragments of faces, smiles, and mouths of the participants in the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 when Socialist Realism has proclaimed the main trend in aesthetics. Of the nearly 600 delegates, by the end of the 1930s, 220, more than a third, were repressed with varying degrees of brutality. The fates were woven into a socio-professional fabric — mutual assistance, competition, betrayal, censorship, and criticism, saving “in the desk” texts that could not be published...

Come and learn more about this touching exhibition in Memento Park.