This issue of ARTMargins presents texts that navigate past and present confrontations with instances of entrenched political power. In some cases, these navigations reflect the authors’ critical analysis of their own experiences and positionality, a necessary step in shaping modes of resistance. In other cases, the complex functions of past, and supposedly monolithic, regimes—be they colonial or state socialist—are recovered through careful attention to the exercise of artistic agency within them. Here as elsewhere, the inertia of certain methodological and hermeneutic frameworks comes up against the need to treat difficult phenomena—like the legacies of Socialist Realism—as open questions.

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Albania has not invented a great historical narrative, unlike many of its neighbors. Here, the conditions of modernity are still able to open up different possibilities for art, possibilities that can be developed without replicating situations and experiences that have already happened elsewhere. For five years, the MANIFESTO project has analyzed and worked on these particularities, through its three editions MANIFESTO Hijacking (2022), MANIFESTO Desertion (2023), and MANIFESTO Great Wave (2024–25). The five-year project proposes a new movement in the visual, cinematographic, theoretical, and political arts: a movement that aims to deconstruct the country’s past along with its current neoliberal … Read more

This review examines the stakes and methods of studying Socialist Realism within the context of a horizontal global art history, as laid out in Was Socialist Realism Global? Modernism, Soc-Modernism, Socially Engaged Figuration (2023) and Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific (2025). Both books reclaim Socialist Realism as a topic for in-depth investigation and narrate largely unknown histories from the Second and Third Worlds. They situate Socialist Realism within, rather than outside, Modernism and engage with the specific historical conditions in the numerous countries each book covers. Both books argue that Socialist Realism, like Western Modernism, contained both … Read more

This article examines Boris Zasypkin’s unpublished 1946 manuscript 25 Years of Creative Work of Soviet Architects of Uzbekistan to reassess Socialist Realism in Soviet architecture. Challenging its conventional interpretation as a unified and prescriptive style, it shows how architectural practice in Uzbekistan emerged as a heterogeneous and contested field shaped by local traditions, uneven engagement with architectural heritage, and individual creative approaches on the ground, rather than an ideological construction channeled from above. In addition to the critical introduction, the article provides the English translation of selected excerpts from Zasypkin’s manuscript, making this key primary source accessible to a wider … Read more

This article examines Boris Zasypkin’s unpublished 1946 manuscript 25 Years of Creative Work of Soviet Architects of Uzbekistan to reassess Socialist Realism in Soviet architecture. Challenging its conventional interpretation as a unified and prescriptive style, it shows how architectural practice in Uzbekistan emerged as a heterogeneous and contested field shaped by local traditions, uneven engagement with architectural heritage, and individual creative approaches on the ground, rather than an ideological construction channeled from above. In addition to the critical introduction, the article provides the English translation of selected excerpts from Zasypkin’s manuscript, making this key primary source accessible to a wider … Read more