The exhibition Anti-Social Art: Experimental Practices in Late East Germany concentrates on one of the Cold War's most contentious contexts: East Germany in its final decades. From photographs and performance art, to independent films and independent publications, artworks from this period reveal the core disjunctions between state power and citizen agency. Importantly, artists created a social sphere that was both independent of and entangled with official culture.

This exhibition was curated by Sara Blaylock, PhD, and Sarah James, PhD, senior curator at Tate Liverpool, with support from a grant-in-aid from the University of Minnesota. Blaylock, author of the book Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany (MIT Press, 2022) is assistant professor of art history at UMD. James is the author of Paper Revolutions: An Invisible Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 2022) and Common Ground: Germanic Photographic Cultures across the Iron Curtain (Yale, 2013).