Opening two weeks after the second post-communist decade officially ended, Transitland is a late arrival at the bitter-sweet party of reminiscence and reflection on the twentieth anniversary of 1989. Parallel to the revolutionary political changes of the perestroika era, 1989 was also a turning point in the history of video art in Eastern Europe, with ex-Bloc artists quick to explore the communicative possibilities of a cheap, censor-proof and accessible medium. The result of an EU-style collaborative international project, Transitland presents the rapid development of the video genre in the region from an archive of 100 key works by artists from twenty-five countries.

The archive includes classic works dealing with the post-communist condition, such as Kai Kaljo’s Loser, in which the artist repeats banal statements about herself followed by canned laughter, so as to highlight the precarious economic situation faced by Estonian artists back in the days before EU membership. Albanian international fixture Anri Sala famously confronted his mother with her Stalinist past in Intervista, while Hito Steyerl excavated the layers of buried pasts beneath Berlin’s Potzdamer Platz in The Empty Centre. Among the hard-hitting films on ethnic conflict, many of which deal with the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, Goran Dević’s film on attitudes to Imported Crows in a Croatian steel town digs deep into the collective psyche, while Damir Niksic’s If I Wasn’t Muslim is a sarcastic musical remake of the barn scene from Fiddler on the Roof, highlighting the fate of Bosnian Muslims in an overwhelmingly Christian Europe.

Hungarian artists score well in this top 100 ‘best of’ East European video art, with Szabolcs Kisspal’s provocative rendering of the Hungarian national anthem sung to the tune of the Romanian one, János Sugár’s video meditation on the deadly presence of the Kalashnikov (or ‘Typewriter of the Illiterate’) in conflicts around the world, and Csaba Nemes’s extraordinary animation series Remake on the Budapest protests of 2006. Striking a lighter note, Hajnal Nemeth’s brilliant Striptease or not? side-steps gender-political reductionism in a mesmerising slow-mo performance, involving feminine dexterity with a red bra on a busy Danube road bridge. 

The films in the show present a wide range of artistic approaches to considering the impact of the political changes of 1989 for both individuals and social groups, from the double-edged rediscovery of national identity, to the trauma of rapid transition to hardnosed capitalism. The exhibition is also accompanied by a useful publication, with essays by well-known art historians from across Eastern Europe. Transitland however, partly because of its remit to survey production from the whole of the last twenty years and the thematic stress on works dealing with the changes of 1989, ultimately feels more historicalthan contemporary. With the twentieth anniversary now safely behind us, it may be time to gently close the post-communist chapter, and focus instead on more urgent artistic responses to the precariousness of twenty-first century life.