NEW YORK NY.- The New Museum presents "Ostalgia," an exhibition that brings together the work of fifty-six artists from twenty countries in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Republics, and parts of Western Europe. The Multi-floor exhibition is on view from July 14–September 25, 2011.

The exhibition takes its title from the German word ostalgie, a term that emerged in the 1990s to describe a sense of longing and nostalgia for the era before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. Twenty years ago, a process of dissolution began, leading to the break-up of the Soviet Union. From the Baltic republics to the Balkans, from Central Europe to Central Asia, entire regions and nations were reconfigured, their constitutions rewritten, their borders redrawn.

Combining seminal figures and emerging artists, "Ostalgia" looks at the art produced in and about some of these countries. Mixing private confessions and collective traumas, the exhibition traces how individuals and entire societies must negotiate new relationships to history, geography, and ideology after the fall of the Soviet Bloc.

Some of the works in "Ostalgia" offer personal reportages on aspects of life under Communism and in the new post-Soviet countries. Composed as a visual archive, "Ostalgia" pays particular attention to the unique place that artists came to occupy in Socialist countries, acting simultaneously as outcasts, visionaries, and witnesses.

Contesting the format of a conventional geographical survey, the exhibition includes works produced by Western European artists who have depicted the reality and myth of the East. "Ostalgia" does not make a case for a unified history of art in the former Eastern Bloc: instead, it illuminates similar atmospheres and sensibilities across nations and also points to dramatic differences—"Ostalgia" is more concerned with a state of mind than a specific place in time.