The Europe of Others – Wonderful Wonderful World

Christine Häuser, Elena Ilina

Christine Häuser and Elena Ilina juxtapose altered photographic works from the time of their youth during the Cold War era. In the process, they explore the common stereotypes prevailing at the time on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
While Christine Häuser’s images focus on the fruits of economic recovery in West Germany – years marked by rapprochement, coming to terms with the past, and the social upheaval of the 1960s, the works of Elena Ilina feature photos of Western European cultural events of the time reproduced in the Soviet magazine Foreign Literature. Heavily screened and difficult to make out, the re-photographed images testify to a time when pictures from Central Europe were withheld from another segment of the European population – in this case the Ukraine – for ideological reasons. The technically miserable condition of these photographs suggests that the cultural achievements of Western capitalism were not allowed to enter the consciousness of Europeans living in a grey reality east of the Iron Curtain.