For the 41st episode of Kitchen Conversations, host Patrycja Rozwora visited the Wende Museum in California and spoke with chief curator and director of programming – Joes Segal.
Dutch (art) historian Joes Segal has published widely on German cultural history, Cold War culture, art and politics in international perspective. Among his book publications we can mention Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West, co-edited with Peter Romijn and Giles Scott-Smith (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), and Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda (Amsterdam University Press, 2016).
The Wende Museum is an art museum, cultural center, and archive of the Cold War that explores social, political and cultural change. The Wende reaches beyond the conventional walls of a museum in pursuit of international scholarship, artistic interpretation, community engagement, digital access and experimental public programming. Wende is a German word meaning “turning point” or “change” that has come to describe the transformative period around the fall of the Berlin Wall. Founded in 2002, the Wende Museum holds an unparalleled collection of art and artifacts from the Cold War era, which serves as a foundation for programs that illuminate the political and cultural changes of the past, offer opportunities to make sense of a changing present, and inspire active participation in the personal and social changes that will shape the future.
Kitchen Conversations with Joes, conducted in one of the museum’s fascinating spaces, revolves around the importance and value of Soviet artifacts in understanding socialist histories and their contemporary consequences. Joes expresses his take on the power of art in understanding the complexities of past events, as well as contemporary ways of speaking about (the broadly defined) socialist art, especially in light of contemporary Eastern European affairs.
You can listen to the podcast on the following streaming platforms:
