Mindsets

The title of the exhibition refers to the various and rich meanings of the word “mindset”: as ways of thinking, personal approaches and attitudes towards the world. On one hand, the exhibition examines these parallelly existing approaches and on the other hand, the resulting conflicts and contradictions.

On a personal level, our mindset includes how we see ourselves and our abilities, based on our experiences and also how we relate to our environment and to the events of the world.

Obviously, our social-cultural background and surrounding that has an effect on the process of forming our opinion is also part of this framework. A mindset, in fact, could function as a special filter, which influences our perception and point of view about a certain phenomena, leading our thinking towards labeling and categorization.

A certain mindset not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but in relation, it also shapes our attitude towards the world. This could be seen as a commitment to a certain principle which is often stable and unchangeable. Even though these closed worlds exist alongside each other, they function as individual universes without any real dialogue between them. As Karl Mannheim wrote in his Sociology of Knowledge in 1931, these models of thinking are autonomous, however their points of view could be limited according to how they choose a content to match their existing framework and how they are trying to preserve their inner coherence.

Our approach towards history appears as a certain framework or mindset through the artworks. It includes the Central-Eastern European identity, the “atmosphere” of the socialist period and the change of the system, and the politicized everydays of the post-1989 era. Our ambivalent approach towards social and cultural system of norms is being emphasized. Furthermore, the collision of mindsets based on different, inner coordinate-systems become visible.