What is to be Done? Methodological Challenges to Art Historical Research in Central and Eastern Europe

Thursday, October 12

9.45 – 10.00 – Introduction

10.00 – 12.00

Panel 1: Revisiting socialist art: state-supported institutions, exhibitions, and cultural diplomacy

Tomasz Zaluski – Introduction: In Search of New Agendas. Potential Histories of Art & Modernization Under Socialism

Maja and Reuben Fowkes – Thirty Victorious Years: an exhibition of engaged realist art from ten socialist states that didn’t shake the world

Irina Cărăbaș – Mexican Art and Cultural Diplomacy in Romania

Ljiljana Kolešnik – Yugoslav practices of cultural exchange in visual arts and politics of non-alignment

12.00 – 13.00 – Lunch break

13.00 – 15.00

Panel 2: Revisiting socialist art: artists’ networks and exhibition histories

Pavlína Morganová – Introduction – The Society of Exhibition under Socialism: what we learnt and what is there to discover in exhibition histories

Mădălina Brașoveanu – State-supported subversion or acts of deterritorialization? How to describe “the alternative” in the art exhibitions from the 1980s in Romania?

Joanna Matuszak – The Nostalgic Lens: Exhibiting Art of the Global East in the West after 1989

Daniel Grúň – From (An)Archival to Decolonial: Research into Politics of Memory in Contemporary Art

15.00 – 15.30 – Coffee break

15.30 – 16.30

Keynote lecture

Edit András – Procrustean Bed or Freudian Couch. Which is the better fit for writing East-Central European Art History?

Friday, October 13

9.00 – 10.00 – Keynote lecture

Jérôme Bazin – How to exhibit socialist realism and (post-)modernism together?

10.00 – 10. 15 – Coffee break

10.15 – 12.15

Panel 3: Social art history and Marxism in a socialist and post-socialist context.

Cristian Nae – Introduction: Marxism and Socialism: An Unavoidable Connection?

Andrea Bátorova – Art history and its narratives in former Czechoslovakia before and after 1989

Jitka Šosová – Revisiting socialist art history: the intention and reality of post-socialist turn

Emese Kürti – The Anarchist and the Alchemist. Tamás Szentjóby’s (dis)position in Marxism

12.15 – 13.30 – Lunch break

13.30 – 15.30

Panel 4: Critical art history in Eastern Europe: race and visual culture

Zsuzsa László – Introduction: The Regional Origins of Situated and Critical Art History: What We Can Learn from it Today

Jakub Banasiak – Re-enchanting 1989. How to get beyond Critical Art History and Touch the Magic of the Postcommunist Transformation?

Alexei Markin – Images of black people in Soviet Union

Uschi Klein – Photography during Romania’s communist period: a missed opportunity or just a past time?

15.30 – 16.00 – Coffee break

16.00 – 18.00

Panel 5: Critical art history in Eastern Europe: gender, labor, and decoloniality

Karolina Wilczyńska – Radical Care as Practice of Female Artists in East-Central Europe after 1989

Karolina Majewska Güde – Integrating Artistic Research in Art History: Exploring Artistic Labor under Socialism from a Transgenerational Feminist Perspective

Daryna Skrynnyk-Myska – Decolonization in the optics of Ukrainian socio-critical art after the full-scale invasion of Russia

Radek Przedpleski – Post-artistic Geomedia. Reclaiming Jerzy Ludwiński’s Environmental Art History