The exhibition examines wide-ranging forms and strategies of masking and unmasking the self, as seen in many works in Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Bank Group. The aim of the collection is to reflect on forms of artistic production within the altered and changing political geographies of Europe, from the 1960s to the present. The historical part looks primarily at works involving political-activist, performative and gender-oriented approaches, and their representation in the public sphere. As a complement, the show also includes several contrary positions not covered by Kontakt. The primary focus of this collection is on conceptual (neo-avant-garde) art from Central and Eastern Europe, and representations of the self in art created under communist regimes and in the subsequent post-socialist situation must be seen as political statements. Many of these states exerted control over individual artistic articulations of the self, as they broke with the state monopoly on image production and constituted a potential threat to the system. Manipulation, imitation, withdrawal, transfer, camouflage or costuming – in various combinations, such techniques of resistance and the corresponding masking serve as representations of subjectivity. Direct realism does not seem to have been an option – most of the works employ indirect language or nuanced rhetorical means of reinterpreting, constructing and staging complex subject positions, serving as a point of departure for an emancipatory theatre of the repressed.