The View from Here [antikvár]

Foreword hroughout the better part of the last decade, the Ohio Arts Council's International Program and Arts Midwest have jointly nurtured an ever-deepening array of relationships among the artists, cultural leaders, and arts institutions of the American Midwest and Central Europe. Through countless conversations and late-night dinners, long meetings and visíts in artists' stúdiós, we have been privileged to leave behind the garb of cultural tourist and assume instead the role of partner and collaborator with our colleagues in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland. Our work over this time has encompassed curatorial and administrative exchanges, artists' residencies, performance and exhibition tours, extensive research and educational programming, and much more. Each of our projects has afforded all involved-participants, audiences, and organizers-that rarely granted opportunity to learn more not only about another culture, but alsó about our ovvn communities and ourselves as seen through that culture's lens. And at each step of the way in these relationships, we have developed a richer understanding of the remarkable bond between these two quite disparate and yet closely connected regions of the world. The View From Here is both the most recent, and in many ways the most exeiting of our collaborations in Central Europe to date. It marks the first time that we have brought together in one setting the works of exceptional contemporary artists from both spheres of our global partnership.The images of the exhibition-the buildings and the people, the landseapes and visions-are at once reflective, provocative, and yet reassuringly familiar. These are images of places we know or have known, places we have lived, places filled with faces that looked back at us in busses and bank lines and cafes each day of our lives.