The exhibition DIS/POSSESSED? explores questions around labor, money, possession, and dispossession.

The term"dispossession" is usually linked to the Soviet times, when private property was confiscated by the state. However, anthropologist and sociologist Joma Nazpary relates this term to post-soviet changes. In particular, how neoliberal reforms and rise of consumerism have transformed the conditions of society, attitudes towards work, and patterns of work. First, the neoliberal reforms and abolition of the welfare state have stripped the majority of access to welfare, education, and work of the Soviet era creating a huge social cleavage among already stratified people. While the elites were immersed in conspicuous consumption and good jobs, the dispossessed part of the society stayed discriminated in the labor market. In spite of poverty, the consumerist mentality created tension between desire and the actual ability to possess.

The exhibition invites to explore new territories of possession and dispossession and to submerge into interconnected viewpoints and multiple climaxes, in which questions such as "What possesses who?" are not as easy to answer as it may first appear.