BERLIN.- Between the end of the Cold War and a remote future: On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, the Berlin based art institution District explores the experiences of the last, transitional European pioneer generation between socialism and post-socialism in the interdisciplinary performance and exhibition project The Forgotten Pioneer Movement.

Central issues are the societal perspectives of an artists’ generation that grew up in the 'Post- Western’ Europe of the 1990s. Through performances at various locations in Berlin, the exhibition at District as well as a public seminar the project activates the process of bearing witness to these "last pioneers” who experienced the perestroika and the collapse of former socialist states as children and adolescents.

Curated by Susanne Husse and Ulrike Gerhardt, The Forgotten Pioneer Movement approaches the history and the present of post-socialism as a European experience regardless of national and geopolitical classifications. The pioneer as representative of a socialist vision of the future and as a former childhood role model serves as a multifaceted projection surface.

In the performance program, collective as well as individual memories are intertwined through the adaption of ‘psychodrama’ as a verbal and gestural memory technique. One of the eight performances, Inscribed Rituals - Bodies in Politics. Pioneers of Marzahn, encompasses the childrens’ choreographies of Dresden based artists Anna Till and Juliane Schmidt. These take place between August and October in the former Haus der Pioniere, Marzahn, in collaboration with Galerie M and the youth center FAIR. Further performances – for example by bankleer and by Domaš Noreika of artist group ŽemAt, or by SKILLS and Alexandra Pirici in collaboration with the HAU theatre – are being presented all over Berlin. SKILLS is a performance group by Camilla Milena Fehér and Sylvi Kretzschmar who create musical sounds via physical movements on stage. The artists realize their futuristic concert performance entitled AVANT in the abandoned Kesselhaus on the site of Malzfabrik – a preview of their piece Pioniergeist, which will premier at HAU in February 2015.

In order to get closer to the “future behind us” described by Edit András, beyond any mythologizing narratives, TFPM suggests new connections between this remote future and current phenomena in the exhibition. The artist Marina Naprushkina presents a new video and a poster series in public space about the pioneer movement reactivated for nationalist reasons by Belarussian president Alexander Grigorjewitsch Lukaschenko, from her archive The Office for Anti-Propaganda. In Naprushkina’s installation, this video faces a wall drawing, specifically created for TFPM, in which collected memories of the educational system by German and Belarussian women of different generations appear as a comic strip.