Retrospective Exhibitions and Identity Politics: The Capitalization of Criticality in Curatorial Accounts of Eastern European Art after 1989 Cristian Nae Retrospective Exhibitions as Art Historical Apparatuses The end of a decade is always a good opportunity to reevaluate the historical distance that separates our present from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Curators of contemporary art seem to react promptly to such opportunities so that at the end of the last decade, just like the end of the nineties, retrospective exhibitions started to compensate for the still scant art historical production in the region, also taking over responsibility for compiling relevant theoretical and art critical texts in the accompanying exhibition catalogues. Therefore, further inquiry into the place and function of such large retrospective exhibitions in relation to the art historical technology of power seems appropriate. What part do they play in the distribution of power in present day identity politics and cultural policy? I will begin by briefly reviewing the position and importance of large exhibitions (of which retrospective exhibitions are a subset) in both writing and challenging art historical practice, that is, in actually making art history. From such a perspective, any exhibition is in itself an apparatus of power. 1 Indeed, exhibitions seem to function in the manner of an “apparatus,” a term which Foucault understands as a network of heterogeneous elements which appears at the intersection of power relations and knowledge relations and has a specific, strategic function affecting the social construction of subjectivity. 2 The exhibition addresses and stages formats from the public sphere, presents selections of artists and artwork and takes part in the art market and the larger art system by empowering them with a specific institutional legitimacy. It does so by proposing specific exhibition “devices” or dispositifs, apparatuses of power which are able to articulate heterogeneous elements in the cultural field (such as the aesthetic, the political, social theory and ethics, series of discursive practices borrowed from disparate fields such as the media, etc.), propose different possible art historical narratives and mediate the critical reception of the artwork (by means of the display and other technical devices such as the catalogue). Large exhibitions do not present only a mere difference in scale and visibility to the small, site-oriented and most often, gallery-produced exhibitions; they also differ in terms of