CULVER CITY, CA.- Two new exhibitions at the Wende Museum challenge conventional notions of the Cold War as a straightforward clash between U.S.-style capitalism and Soviet-style communism. Watching Socialism: The Television Revolution in Eastern Europe and Nonalignment and Tito in Africa opened June 23 at the Wende, which pairs an unmatched collection of art and artifacts from the Eastern Bloc with contemporary art and innovative events.

Watching Socialism: The Television Revolution in Eastern Europe
What was on TV in the Soviet Bloc? If “propaganda” is your immediate response, a new exhibition at the Wende Museum will complicate the picture. Just like in the West, television was a part of everyday life in the Eastern Bloc, with varied programming, transnational reach, and even subversive potential. Both the capitalist West and the communist East attempted to leverage TV as a medium that represented modernity and progress during the Cold War. While television was indeed a tool that promised to spread communist ideology, the reality was more complex. The state had little control over how viewers received messages in the privacy of their living rooms. Audiences in some communist countries could get television signals from the West, which gave them a peek at the other side. And during the later years of the Cold War, socialist television introduced commercials, copied Western formats, and imported American series. Television was even occasionally appropriated to broadcast countercultural messages.

“The exhibition reveals how interrelated the history of television has been in communist and capitalist societies, and how strongly both traditions have informed post–Cold War television,” said Wende Museum Chief Curator and Director of Programming Joes Segal.

Co-curated by the Wende Museum and British scholars Sabina Mihelj and Susan Reid, Watching Socialism: The Television Revolution in Eastern Europe features excerpts from news programs as well as sitcoms, cartoons, and other televised content alongside TV-related magazines, artifacts, toys, and television sets from the Eastern Bloc, offering viewers a chance to experience what it was really like to watch TV on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Nonalignment and Tito in Africa
The Cold War is commonly viewed as a geopolitical struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States, and an ideological clash between communism and capitalism. Yet what gets effaced in this narrative are the hundreds of millions of people from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere who refused to accept this bipolar division of the world.

Rather than position themselves on either side of the U.S.-Soviet divide, the governments and political parties that came to encompass the Nonaligned Movement (NAM, 1961-present) pushed for nonalignment and peaceful co-existence. NAM’s objective was the creation of a global anti-imperialist social movement and peaceful world order grounded in a commitment to justice, opposition to colonialism and empire, the redistribution of world resources, and shared acknowledgement of all people’s contributions to the heritage of culture, knowledge, and science.

One of NAM’s trailblazers was the government of Yugoslavia and its leader, Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980). As Yugoslavia and Tito’s aura grew, the country increased its ties and influence in the anticolonial world. A key region that it prioritized was in the continent of Africa. The image of Yugoslav-African solidarity was constructed and circulated via African news editorials and carefully staged photographs of Yugoslav delegation visits to African countries. Yet these proclamations and staged spectacles of “friendship” and “solidarity” could not avoid contradiction. Often at the center of the image were Tito and other state leaders, which reinforced the problematic deification of these political figures and the perception that the actions of a few exceptional “big men,” rather than mass movements, were shaping change and new postwar realities. In addition, some photographs reinforce ideas of African dependency and colonial stereotypes of Africa, depicting a one-way exchange between Yugoslavia and Africa. The ambivalent nature of these representations reveals the still-relevant challenges of both framing and enacting solidarity amid uneven power relations.

Iterations of Tito in Africa have been exhibited at the Museum of Yugoslavia (Belgrade) and the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford). The exhibition was organized by Paul Betts (Oxford) and Radina Vučetić (University of Belgrade), with, at the Wende, curatorial consultation by Robeson Taj Frazier (USC) and exhibition design by Joes Segal and Anna Rose Canzano.