Private Frontiers: Media Legacies of the Cold War @ BAMPFA

Private Frontiers presents new and recent work in photography, video, and installation by contemporary artists who critically engage the Cold War as a prism for understanding today’s media-saturated world. Using rigorous approaches to media history, artists Naeem Mohaiemen, Prajakta Potnis, TJ Shin, and Tiffany Sia draw on media such as television broadcasts and pop songs to critically examine how politics was articulated and contested through culture in the second half of the twentieth century.

Bookended by the end of World War II in 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Cold War was a transformative period in global history, signaling the waning of Modernism at the end of the twentieth century. Earlier historians defined the Cold War as the noncombative contest between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union, but recent works by scholars, artists, and writers have stressed that this period was also defined by the struggles for decolonization and liberation movements across Asia and globally.

During the Cold War, culture played an undeniable role in shaping the perceptions of individuals, nations, and the global order. International magazines, photographs, and television broadcasts were mobilized as tools of propaganda, but they also operated as a means of forging solidarity and connections across vast distances. By looking at how art, media, and politics have been historically intertwined, the artists in this exhibition give insight into the art and politics of our contemporary moment