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The purpose of this article is to show the genealogy and the development of the 'Soros realism phenomenon', i.e. to analyse the process that was accompanied by the homogenisation of the art practices in the remote corners of Eastern Europe, which previously had been very weakly related or the relationship was missing completely. An attempt is made to show how this process cannot be reduced to the mere network effect of Soros Centers of Contemporary Art, but that there are multiple factors and libidinal investments at play here; among other traits is the layer of Eastern European conceptualism of the 1970s and 1980s, which the Soros realism model is based upon.
Intro: Blood and Honey
In her article on geographically defined exhibitions, Raluca Voinea writes about different shows in the 1990s / early 2000s concerned with the Balkan region and identity. Among other shows, she analyses the exhibition and the selection process of the artists for Blood & Honey. Future's in the Balkans (Klosterneuburg, Vienna, 16 May - 28 September 2003), which was one of the last exhibitions curated by Harald Szeemann (1933-2005). Voinea claims that, despite the fact that the selection was based on the recommendations of the curators and artists in each country, Szeemann's 'preconceived image of the Balkans was more powerful and pigeonholed the realities he found 'in the field', not least because his own aura created certain expectations of the people he met, and it is likely that they delivered him the image he was looking for'.1 In the footnote for that remark she goes on to retell another famous anecdote by Slavoj Žižek. Žižek's anecdote is about an anthropological expedition that makes contact with a wild tribe in the New Zealand jungle who allegedly danced a terrible war dance in grotesque death-masks:
When they reached the tribe in the evening, they asked them to dance it for them, and the dance performed the next morning did in fact match the description; satisfied, the expedition returned to civilization and wrote a much-praised report on the savage rites of the primitives. Shortly afterwards, however, another expedition reached this tribe and learned to speak their language properly; it was shown that this terrible dance did not exist in itself at all: in...