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ARTMargins Online Celebrates 25 Years!

ARTMargins Online (AMO) published its first article on January 15, 1999, an interview with art critic and theorist Boris Groys by AMO founding editor Sven Spieker. Since then we’ve published nearly a thousand essays, reviews, interviews, podcasts, and critical texts exploring postwar and contemporary art from East Central Europe in a global context. 

Throughout this year, we’ll be reflecting on these 25 years by inviting our authors to delve into the AMO archive to explore perspectives that can illuminate our present, and by organizing conversations involving artists, critics, curators, and researchers from Eastern Europe and beyond to reflect on the … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Sasha Razor, Lesia Pchólka, Uladzimir Hramovich ·

Snapshot Dialogue: Lesia Pchólka (Berlin) and Uladzimir Hramovich (Berlin)

As part of its 25th Anniversary Celebrations, ARTMargins Online hosts a series of short dialogues between critics and curators from Eastern Europe and one or several artists. With this series of conversations, we want to shed light on the challenging political and economic conditions under which artists and other producers of culture in the region operate today, yet we also aim to highlight the amazing vibrancy, resilience, and resourcefulness of its art scenes.

This conversation between Researcher of art migration from Belarus, Sasha Razor (Los Angeles) and Berlin-based Belarusian artists Lesia Pchólka and Uladzimir Hramovich focuses on the artists’ engagement … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Mădălina Braşoveanu ·

On the Growing Distance Between the Two Sides of the River Elbe: Ana Lupaș Exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum and the Western Nostalgia for the Eastern Myth

In the summer of 2014, a (presumably) retrospective exhibition of the artist Ana Lupaș was organized in Cluj, in the spaces of a new building, The Office, destined to become a business hub. It was an exhibition behind closed doors, installed on the ground floor in rooms with glass walls, which had been completely covered with opaque curtains. I remember how I knelt on the sidewalk by those huge windows and put my head to the ground, trying to see something under the cloth curtain that didn’t quite reach the bottom. That exhibition had been organized for the Tate London’s … Read more

News

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Conclusion of the Project “Archives of the Future” at Muzeum sztuki in Łódż

Muzeum sztuki in Łódż announces the successful conclusion of its project “Archives of the Future,” which was carried out in cooperation between Muzeum sztuki; Artpool Art Research Center Budapest; the Museum of Fine Arts – Central European Research Institute for Art History (Budapest); and the Polish Institute in Budapest. The project started in spring 2024 with two study visits to Łódź and Budapest. The aim of the first part of the project was to become familiar with the Artpool archive, which was founded by György Galántai and Julia Klaniczay in 1979, and the Poetry Bureau, established by Andrzej Partum in
… Read more

ARTMargins Online: Forum

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 by Kristóf Nagy ·

25th Anniversary Reflections: The Paradox of Artistic Labor: An Interview with Katja Praznik, by Jasna Jasna Žmak, 2017

ARTMargins Online is celebrating 25 years! To mark the occasion, the editors invited past ARTMargins Online authors and other writers from the region to select one article from AMO’s online archive of more than 1000 texts, providing a brief introduction that highlights the chosen item’s continued relevance. ARTMargins Online published its first article on January 15, 1999. Today, the publication is one of the largest online archival resources for contemporary art from East-Central Europe and beyond. Our reflection project celebrates AMO’s 25 years, but it also aims to highlight our unwavering commitment to promoting research, criticism, and artistic projects that … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Lesia Khomenko, Svitlana Biedarieva ·

Snapshot Dialogue: Svitlana Biedarieva (Mexico City) and Lesia Khomenko (Kyiv)

As part of its 25th Anniversary Celebration, ARTMargins Online hosts a series of short dialogues between critics and curators from Eastern Europe and one or several artists. With this series of conversations, we want to shed light on the challenging political and economic conditions under which artists and other producers of culture in the region operate today, yet we also aim to highlight the amazing vibrancy, resilience, and resourcefulness of its art scenes.

In this conversation, Ukrainian critic and art historian Svitlana Biedarieva and artist Lesia Khomenko address the development of Ukrainian art after the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion

… Read more

News

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Call for Papers: “Trading Zones: Art and Philosophy in Eastern Europe since 1945”

This  trans-disciplinary workshop (June 2025, details below) will investigate the trading zone between artistic and aesthetic practice and philosophical ideas in Central and Eastern Europe. We are interested in artists from the region who are engaged in a critical dialogue with philosophy and philosophical ideas (both from Eastern Europe and beyond), and whose work possesses transformative experiential, intellectual and political potential. We are equally interested in philosophers and theorists from the region whose thinking engages or addresses art. We view the relationship between art and philosophy as a productive form of synergy rather than as an instance of appropriation, static … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Alexandra Timonina ·

Avant-Garde Book Revised by Emerging Artists at the 2024 Pavilion of Georgia in Venice

The Pavilion of Georgia at the 2024 Venice Biennial brought together three new commissions by Grigol Nodia, Nika Koplatadze, and the duo of Juliette George and Rodrigue de Ferluc, all placed in dialogue with the story of the long-forgotten German astronomer Ernst Wilhelm Tempel.  On view at the Palazzo Palumbo Fossati in the San Maurizio area, this exhibition of rare daintiness and wit is a collaborative project of these emerging French and Georgian artists that revisits Tempel’s 19th-century drawings alongside 65 Maximiliana ou l’exercice illégal de l’astronomie (65 Maximiliana or the Illegal Practice of Astronomy), a 1964 artist’s book by … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Forum

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 by Anthony Gardner ·

25th Anniversary Reflections: Whither the Postcommunist? Edit András and Piotr Piotrowski, “Provincializing the West,” 2012

ARTMargins Online is celebrating 25 years! To mark the occasion, the editors invited past ARTMargins Online authors and other writers from the region to select one article from AMO’s online archive of more than 1000 texts, providing a brief introduction that highlights the chosen item’s continued relevance. ARTMargins Online published its first article on January 15, 1999. Today, the publication is one of the largest online archival resources for contemporary art from East-Central Europe and beyond. Our reflection project celebrates AMO’s 25 years, but it also aims to highlight our unwavering commitment to promoting research, criticism, and artistic projects that … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Tobias Rosen ·

Locals Nowhere: Global Histories of Labor, Art, and Migration, Summer 2024

There is no there there, Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt (MMK), April 13 – September 29, 2024

Global contemporary exhibitions have invented a new conceit: they have begun to locate migrants everywhere and nowhere. Both There is no there there at Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Art (MMK) and the 60th Venice Biennale “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere” are evidence of this troubling development. Though this will primarily be a review of the exhibition at MMK, the Venice Biennale is a crucial point of comparison for understanding how contemporary curators are grappling with the quandaries of migration and place … Read more

Elena Chemerska in collaboration with Ivana Mirchevska, thresholds of no-body in particular, 2020, installation, sculpture, two channel video, video essay 8’30, sound.

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Jon Blackwood, Elena Chemerska, Ivana Mirchevska ·

Snapshot Dialogue: Jon Blackwood (Aberdeen/Sarajevo/Skopje), Elena Chemerska (Skopje/Berlin), and Ivana Mirchevska (Skopje)

As part of its 25th Anniversary Celebrations, ARTMargins Online hosts a series of short dialogues between critics and curators from Eastern Europe and one or several artists. With this series of conversations, we want to shed light on the challenging political and economic conditions under which artists and other producers of culture in the region operate today, yet we also aim to highlight the amazing vibrancy, resilience, and resourcefulness of its art scenes.

This conversation between art historian and curator Jon Blackwood, and artists Elena Chemerska and Ivana Mirchevska, focuses firstly on the conditions for making contemporary art in contemporary … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Tomáš Pospiszyl  ·

Horizontal Art History and Beyond: Revisiting Peripheral Critical Practices

Agata Jakubowska and Magdalena Radomska, eds., Horizontal Art History and Beyond: Revisiting Peripheral Critical Practices (New York and London: Routledge, 2023), 223 pp.

Piotr Piotrowski (1952–2015) continues to be regarded as one of the most significant figures in the art history of modern and contemporary art in Eastern Europe. Piotrowski’s work has not only influenced his Polish colleagues. His international activities and translations of his texts have ensured that he remains one of the few art historians from Eastern Europe known to experts beyond the borders of the region. His book In the Shadow of Yalta, published in English … Read more

Exhibition view with a range of objects and images on the walls and display boxes on the ground.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Nicoletta Rousseva ·

The Outsider: Vladan Radovanović at Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art

Vladan Radovanović: Ahead of his Time and Beyond / Vladan Radovanović: Ispred vremena i izvan, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, March 28 – September 10, 2024

Ours is an age of inclusive, pluralistic categories. For the discipline of art history, this is evident in the commonplace use of terms like modernisms and global contemporary art. Capacious and limitless, these terms seek to dispel myths of quality and canonicity, to flatten hierarchies between centers and peripheries, and to resolve asymmetries between the local and the global with little more than the use of a prefix or a plural. The retrospective exhibition, … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans ·

Vernacular Modernisms, or Art in Spite of All

IN THE EYE OF THE STORM: MODERNISM IN UKRAINE, 1900-1930S, THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA NATIONAL MUSEUM, MADRID, SPAIN; MUSEUM LUDWIG, COLOGNE; THE ROYAL MUSEUMS OF FINE ARTS OF BELGIUM, BRUSSELS; THE BELVEDERE, VIENNA; THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS, LONDON; NOVEMBER 29, 2022-MAY 2, 2023

Visiting a modern art exhibition from Ukraine at this critical juncture is an uncanny experience. The modernist undertaking of the early twentieth century vividly demonstrates parallels between Ukraine’s  historical quest for independence and the country’s current resistance against Russian aggression, which began in 2014 and escalated into a full-scale war in 2022. In the Eye of the Storm… Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Boris Kostadinov, Kamen Stoyanov, ARTMargins Online Editorial Collective ·

Snapshot Dialogue: Boris Kostadinov (Berlin) and Kamen Stoyanov (Vienna/Sofia)

As part of its 25th Anniversary Celebrations, ARTMargins Online hosts a series of short dialogues between critics and curators from Eastern Europe and one or several artists. With this series of conversations, we want to shed light on the challenging political and economic conditions under which artists and other producers of culture in the region operate today, yet we also aim to highlight the amazing vibrancy, resilience, and resourcefulness of its art scenes. We begin the series with a conversation between Berlin-based curator Boris Kostadinov and Kamen Stoyanov (Vienna and Sofia). The conversation was recorded in Vienna on September 13, … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Forum

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 by Uroš Čvoro ·

25th Anniversary Reflections: East of Art, Transformations in Eastern Europe: “What Comes After the Wall?” by Bojana Pejić, 2003

ARTMargins Online is celebrating 25 years! To mark the occasion, the editors invited past ARTMargins Online authors and other writers from the region to select one article from AMO’s online archive of more than 1000 texts, providing a brief introduction that highlights the chosen item’s continued relevance. ARTMargins Online published its first article on January 15, 1999. Today, the publication is one of the largest online archival resources for contemporary art from East-Central Europe and beyond. Our reflection project celebrates AMO’s 25 years, but it also aims to highlight our unwavering commitment to promoting research, criticism, and artistic projects that … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Judit Árva ·

Approximating Borders: Artistic Research in Practice

Ádám Albert, Eszter Lázár, Dániel Máté, Edina Nagy (eds.), Approximating Boarders: Artistic Research in Practice (Budapest: Hungarian University of Fine Art, 2023) 223 pp.

The question of knowledge resonates throughout human history. There have been many attempts to define it across philosophy, art, and science, but one cannot find an ultimate agreement upon the meaning of the term. We could cite innumerable perspectives and ideas about knowledge—from Descartes to Adorno in philosophy, to quite rigid and strict rules from natural science—but this would testify only to the diversity of ideas associated with “knowledge.” In the capitalist system, knowledge is a … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Forum

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 by Biljana Purić ·

25th Anniversary Reflections: From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: A Look Back at Marina Gržinić’s Interview with Maja and Reuben Fowkes, 2012

ARTMargins Online is celebrating 25 years! To mark the occasion, the editors invited past ARTMargins Online authors and other writers from the region to select one article from AMO’s online archive of more than 1000 texts, providing a brief introduction that highlights the chosen item’s continued relevance. ARTMargins Online published its first article on January 15, 1999. Today, the publication is one of the largest online archival resources for contemporary art from East-Central Europe and beyond. Our reflection project celebrates AMO’s 25 years, but it also aims to highlight our unwavering commitment to promoting research, criticism, and artistic projects that … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Kata Benedek ·

Grafting Solidarities – From the Factories to the Fields

Matter of Art Biennial 2024, Prague, June 14 – September 29, 2024

Six years ago, the Czech section of the Tranzit network launched a new art biennial in Prague titled Matter of Art, currently in its third edition. In contemporary times, nearly every major city hosts biennials to foster local cultural vitality, generate tourism, and enhance the city’s international perception and influence. Each new initiative sparks inquiries into its objectives, content, and audience, at home and globally. This constant self-reflection is especially crucial for biennials in East Central Europe—such as the Biennale Warszawa, Kyiv Biennial, OFF-Biennale Budapest, and Survival … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Forum

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 by Corina L. Apostol ·

25th Anniversary Reflections: Roundtable “Arts Publishing in Eastern Europe in Times of Crisis” (ARTMargins Online Editors), 2022

ARTMargins Online is celebrating 25 years! To mark the occasion, the editors invited past ARTMargins Online authors and other writers from the region to select one article from AMO’s online archive of more than 1000 texts, providing a brief introduction that highlights the chosen item’s continued relevance. ARTMargins Online published its first article on January 15, 1999. Today, the publication is one of the largest online archival resources for contemporary art from East-Central Europe and beyond. Our reflection project celebrates AMO’s 25 years, but it also aims to highlight our unwavering commitment to promoting research, criticism, and artistic projects that … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Forum / ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Karolina Majewska-Güde ·

25th Anniversary Reflections: Roundtable “Central and East European Art and Culture, 1945-Present” (ed. Susan Snodgrass), 2001

ARTMargins Online is celebrating 25 years! To mark the occasion, the editors invited past ARTMargins Online authors and other writers from the region to select one article from AMO’s online archive of more than 1000 texts, providing a brief introduction that highlights the chosen item’s continued relevance. ARTMargins Online published its first article on January 15, 1999. Today, the publication is one of the largest online archival resources for contemporary art from East-Central Europe and beyond. Our reflection project celebrates AMO’s 25 years, but it also aims to highlight our unwavering commitment to promoting research, criticism, and artistic projects that … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Christopher Williams-Wynn ·

“Ende statt Wende”: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s Typewritings and the Critique of German Reunification

When checking the mail in either of the two Germanys in February 1990, one might have expected to find the usual mixture of bills and junk, as well as personal correspondence and official letters. More unusually, the mailbox might have contained an SOS message: “This is a cry for help!” Written as a plea for support, notably in English, this short text called on individuals to write to the parliamentary bodies of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and decried the destruction of “social circumstances and rights” in the GDR. This distress signal had been … Read more

A tapestry made of wires forms an image reminiscent of a Yugoslav-era print of a worker pumping her fist in the air.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Hella Wiedmer-Newman ·

The Aesthetics of Economic Migration: nGbK’s Gastarbeiter 2.0 Exhibition

Gastarbeiter 2.0: Arbeit means Rad, at nGbK Berlin, April 13 – June 16, 2024

Jelena Fužinato’s mobile structure Builder’s Daughter: Everything is Peachy stands at the entrance to Gastarbeiter 2.0: Arbeit means Rad, an ambitious new exhibition hosted by the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK). Composed from the same gleaming chrome as all of the installations in the exhibition, the piece takes the form of scaffolding holding a landscape painting of the artist’s home in Prijedor (Bosnia and Herzegovina), which was assembled with the help of a group of hired workers. Able to be freely moved around the … Read more

A book cover featuring a black and white photograph of artist Šejla Kamerić leaning against a blank wall, outdoors. The title of the book (I am Jugoslovenka! Feminist Performance Politics During and After Yugoslav Socialism) appears over the image in the lower part, along with the author's name, Jasmina Tumbas.

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Dorothé Orczyk ·

Jugoslovenka as an Act of Resistance

Jasmina Tumbas, I am Jugoslovenka! Feminist performance politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 344 pp.

Reading the first chapter of Jasmina Tumbas’ publication I am Jugoslovenka! made me smile and think of my mother. The author cites Bojana Pejić talking about wearing original Levi’s jeans. My mother grew up in socialist—explicitly not communist—Poland, and moved to the Netherlands in the 1980s, when she was in her twenties. When I bought my first pair of jeans, she told me she got her first pair from Yugoslavia, where Western commodities were so much easier to obtain. Through … Read more

An installation view of a museum with white walls and a glossy gray floor. We are looking into a broad corner of the museum, and in the space we see three-dimensional displays of textile works, some mounted on rectangular frames. The works are brightly colored, with a combination of organic, wavy patterns and (in the work furthest from us) silhouettes that recall rockets or spaceships. There is also a video monitor mounted on the raised floor section closest to us.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Sara Blaylock ·

Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc 1960s-1980s

Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc 1960s-1980s, at Walker Art Center, November 11, 2023 – March 10, 2024; Phoenix Art Museum, April 17, 2024 – September 15, 2024; and Vancouver Art Gallery, December 14, 2024 – April 21, 2025

Thirty-two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the exhibition Multiple Realities offers a geographically expansive introduction to the creative autonomy that existed behind the Iron Curtain. To the average—which is to say non-specialist—viewer, Multiple Realities provides an intelligible, though not altogether nuanced, view of the Cold War East as a space ruled by ideological inflexibility. Nevertheless, … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Klara Kemp-Welch ·

Ricochets: Ukrainian Solidarity and Resilience at the 60th Biennale di Venezia

The war in Ukraine continues to loom large at this edition of the Venice Biennale, as it did at the last, though now the nightmare unfolds in parallel with the heavily mediatized Israel-Hamas war. The city’s walls are plastered with red fly posters advertising directions to the “Nearest Bomb Shelter,” which, as a map shows, is located not far from the Ukrainian pavilion. This information vies for pedestrians’ attention with the “No Genocide Pavilion” Palestinian solidarity posters. An exhibition has been mounted in the Israeli pavilion, but a sign informs visitors that this will remain closed pending the release of … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz ·

“Being Together”: the Meeting of Mail-Artists at the F-Art Festival in Gdańsk, 1975

1975 marked the changing field of neo-avant-garde practice in Poland in which a popularization and consolidation of the mail art scene brought to the fore the significance of networked art, particularly in its capacity to foster international exchanges and meetings. In the first half of the decade contact became an important feature of conceptual art and neo-avant-garde art in the region, both as a subject of art and as a practice. The following analysis of artistic events and undertakings in 1975 proposes this year as a watershed moment in the development of networked art in the region and re-thinking how … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Uroš Čvoro ·

Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia

Sanja Horvatinčić and Beti Žerovc, eds., Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia (Berlin: Archive Books, 2023), 424 pp. 

Maybe they never really left the public consciousness, but monuments have been at the front of public discussions in the last decade. Despite major world events such as a pandemic and several wars erupting – or possibly precisely because of these major events – there has been significant attention paid to our relationship with public monuments. The so-called “statue wars” in the US and UK of recent years are one example.(Statue wars have been covered in AMO … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 2

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Subscription Required © 2024 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Małgorzata Kaźmierczak ·

“Real Time Story Telling”: A Performance-Art Festival in the Context of International Networks during the Transitional Period in Poland before and after 1989

The article explains the situation of performance artists in Poland during the transition period before and after 1989. Then it focuses on the first large performance art festival in Poland after 1989, Real Time Story Telling. It was organized in Sopot and Gdańsk in 1991 by Galeria Działań and curated by the outstanding artist and art theorist Jan Świdziński. The article explains the idea of the festival and briefly describes the curatorial activity of the invited international performance artists. The article also outlines the international network of connections between performance art festivals, which depended on the personal relationships between artists … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 2

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Subscription Required © 2024 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by André Keiji Kunigami ·

The Problem with Film: Murayama Tomoyoshi’s Variations on the Visible

The article explores the film theory written by the Japanese avant-garde artist Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–1977). Murayama authored a robust yet understudied body of film writing, in the 1920s and 1930s. Although he had a prolific and stable activity related to film—in criticism, theory, screenplays, and even directing—he held an ambivalent opinion about the medium. For him, film could never fulfill art’s political task due to what he saw as the ontological restrictions of the medium: its supposedly incorporeal and incessant display of images. However, he kept repeatedly returning to film, based on the fascination with a certain vitality that he … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 2

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Subscription Required © 2024 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Cristian Nae ·

Constellational Modernisms: “Socialist Humanism” and “Contextual Art” in Ion Bitzan and Wanda Mihuleac’s Graphic Art of the 1970s

Art exhibitions acted as facilitators of transnational encounters among artists during the Cold War. This article analyzes the emergence and local circulation of two art critical concepts which described adaptations of art practices and techniques associated with Pop art and conceptual art in Romanian graphic arts of the 1970s as an expanded artistic medium. Focusing on the way Romanian artists Ion Bitzan and Wanda Mihuleac adjusted their experimental art practices to suit different audiences in state-supported exhibitions such as the Romanian Pavilions in Venice or the Ljubljana Graphic Arts Biennale, as well as in other large-scale exhibitions organized in Romania … Read more