Art for Modern Architecture: Fall of Communism (June 1986-June 1994)

The installation Art for Modern Architecture: Fall of Communism (February 1986-June 1994) covers a large wall with seventy-nine individually framed vintage newspaper cover pages, evoking the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This revolutionary act marked the dissolution of the political and ideological space commonly referred to as the Eastern Bloc. Marine Hugonnier’s assemblage of newspapers from each of the bloc-affiliated countries documents key events during a period that saw the transformation of the communist regime and the rupture of ties with the Soviet Union. In its entirety, it redraws the entangled storylines connecting the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which started on February 25, 1986, to the election of President Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus in 1994 as well as the reunification of Germany and the early stages of expansion of NATO and the European Union.

Instead of press photographs, the front pages display variously sized and colored collage-style paper rectangles in cyan, magenta, red, black, and green—the colors representative of the inks commonly used in photomechanical reproduction.The arrangement reveals a deliberate chromatic sequencing, with each event encoded by a single hue across different newspapers. Art for Modern Architecture: Fall of Communism is part of a larger series that Hugonnier has been working on consistently since 2005. Inspired by Ellsworth Kelly’s book Line, Form, Color (1951), Art for Modern Architecture strives for a contemporary articulation of the democratization of art and its publicfunction. Kelly’s assertion that painting was merely a hangover from the Renaissance and “the future artist must engage directly with society” outlines a social program of art, equally intent on abolishing traditional painting and reclaiming the architectural spaces of Modernism. In a seemingly indirect but conceptually linked approach, Hugonnier’s series gives form to Kelly’s vision through the use of newspapers and their architectural scaffolds, like kiosks, stands, and newsboards. Print has been the primary medium through which the concept of the modern nation was disseminated; newspapers, as a primary technology of modern nationhood, played a pivotal role in fostering a collective political identity on either side of the Iron Curtain.They facilitated the cohesion of diverse populations and synchronized collective experiences, particularly in times of war and crisis.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "The Ecologies of Peace", C3A, Córdoba, 2024)