Call for Submissions

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusettes, USA, in collaboration with Masaryk University and the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Czech Republic, invite submissions to participate in the seminar, Art History on the Disciplinary Map in East-Central Europe, 18 -19 November 2010, to be held in Brno, Czech Republic. 

This is the second in a series of seminars taking place in the region between 2010 and 2011 as part of Research and Academic Program’s East-Central Europe initiative, Unfolding Narratives: Art Histories in East-Central Europe after 1989, generously funded by the Andrew. W. Mellon Foundation with additional support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative.

The Brno seminar will deal with the following topics:

• Art History in the Humanities: What is the place of art history in the humanities? What is its status compared to other disciplines for example, literature, history, or philosophy within the humanities? How does it relate to other visual disciplines and/or to the challenges of the expanding boundaries of art history such as, visual studies, for example?   
• Art History and Theory: What is the status of “theory” in art history? To what extent does it underpin art historical work in the East-Central European context?
• Art History and its Institutions: How does art history live within the academy, the museum, and the art market today? What are the pressures and challenges of art history within these settings? Are there other serious contexts  – exhibitions, biennials, transregional projects, publications, internet – in which art history is being shaped?
• Art History’s Blind Spots:  What is being suppressed or avoided in research, in teaching, in curricula, in writing, and in exhibitions? What is the relationship between “local” art histories and a “global” discipline of art history? How are local art histories being constrained by the historical traditions of German Kunstwissenschaft, Anglo-American academic traditions, and the global thrust of the contemporary discipline? Do local practices and traditions offer some viable alternatives/challenges to the global discipline?

The format for the seminar is a combination of paper presentations and roundtable discussions that will take place over 2 days in Brno. Travel, accommodation, and meals for duration of the seminar will be provided by the organizers. We invite you to submit a proposal for a paper (of no more than 10 pages) that speaks to one of the above-mentioned topics.

Submission procedure:
Please submit a 300-word abstract by June 15, 2010 to Dr. Ladislav Kesner ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).
The deadline for the submission of the final paper is September 30, 2010.

Włodzimierz Borowski was one of the most radical critics of modernist art practice in Poland. A conference devoted to his life and work will be held November 19 - 20 2010, in connection with a Borowski retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

From the middle of the 1950s, Borowski demistyfied the notion of the artistic object and the artist alike. Rejecting traditional media and pointing to the legacy of Duchamp, Borowski went on to create ephemeral works in which he reevaluated the legacy of the readymade.

In the 1960s Borowski developed the idea of the "syncretic show" that anticipated the idioms of performance and conceptual art. From the early 1970s until his death Borowski was engaged in the development of a metaphysical concept of autonomous art in a variety of media.

Full of contradictions, Borowski’s artistic output earned him a firm position in the narrative of Polish art history. However, the debate around the potential and limitations of his artistic positions has only just started.

ARTMargins can now conveniently be read on mobile devices such as the iPhone or Blackberry. Just access www.artmargins.com on your device and start reading the specially configured version of the magazine.

As it awaits the completion of its new building (currently being designed by Swiss architect Christian Kerez), the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw begins its second year of regular artistic operations at its temporary site, across from the Palace of Culture and Science in the center of Warsaw.
MoMAW's new building is set to open in 2014.

The Museum's current activities are focused on establishing an operating model that takes account of the shifting social, economic, and cultural landscapes in Europe. MoMAW inaugurated its program last spring with a research project and an exhibition entitled "'As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film'": Experiment in the Art of Yugoslavia in the '60s and '70s", which dealt with experimental strategies in the visual arts in the former Yugoslavia.

Presently, MoMAW is presenting the first retrospective of Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu.

New York City, February 9-12, 2011. Participants to be announced.

The ARTMargins Forum on Contemporary Curatorial Practices in Eastern Europe Twenty Year After the Wall addresses the current state of curatorial practice in (or from) Eastern Europe, a region whose art institutions are increasingly positioning themselves within the global art field. At the same time, curatorship in Eastern Europe continues to be affected by the structural weakness of many of the region's art institutions and by numerous economic and social obstacles. As a way of mitigating the effects of these problems, Eastern Europe - like other parts of the world - has seen a proliferation of biennials and other international art shows that have sought to shift the focus from a local to a regional or trans-national perspective. Apart from analyzing the economic, institutional, social, and more generally cultural aspects of these developments, the panel inquires into the way in which curators from Eastern Europe position themselves in the (much) expanded field of what has been called "the Curatorial", a global practice of exhibiting art within the global economic context of 21st-century developed capitalism.