While Budapest’s seasonal shows dwell on serious matters of neo-constructivism, the communist past and the legacy of experimental film, nearby Vienna has gone for a sexier take on contemporary art. Ten years on from After the Wall, the groundbreaking exhibition that shaped our understanding of East European art in the first post-communist decade, many of the original players are back in MUMOK in a poignant rerun of the original show. Curated by Berlin-based art historian Bojana Pejić, who was also the co-curator of the 1999 exhibition, Gender Check takes a flexible reading of gender theory as a guide to the legacy of East and Central European art since the 1960s.

Gender Check is a very large show, made up of 400 works by over 200 artists in all possible media, spread over five floors of an iconic museum, which is a sister institution to Budapest’s own Ludwig Museum. The show is thankfully organised chronologically as well as thematically, starting with the female heroes of Soviet labour in Socialist Realism, moving up through the 1970s photography of orgasms, to contemporary works that combine sex, capitalism and pornography.  The advantage of this very broad spectrum is that dozens of interesting male and female, straight and queer artists that were otherwise forgotten or neglected have been rediscovered for an international audience, forcing the handful of women art celebrities from Eastern Europe to share the spotlight.

A significant number of Hungarian artists, collectors and curators made it over for the lavish sushi, vodka and techno-driven party at the opening, as well as the highbrow conference that followed. Hungarian artists are well represented in Gender Check, from the photographic installations of feminist art icon Orshi Drozhdik to the multilayered videos of Berlin-based Hajnál Nemeth, the knitted gas mask of Zsuzsa Szenes and the puzzling series of stamps by Imre Gábor, She’s been my life since 1992 (to love to fuck to die).

Gender Check was the work of a team of 24 highly qualified researchers from each former Eastern European country, although ultimately the list of artists was drawn up in Vienna. The diluted view of feminism that was acceptable to MUMOK and the show’s financial backers paradoxically make for a very broad interpretation of gender that plays to the strengths of Eastern Europe’s engagement with feminine and masculine gender roles, resulting in a broad cross-section of artworks from a variety of formal, conceptual and sexual positions.