Monthly Archive: November 2024

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

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 these “snapshot” 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 North … Read more

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.

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

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 StormRead more