The ARTMargins Online Working and Advisory Colllective is an independent group engaged in research related to art in the global peripheries, with a special focus on the Eastern European and post-Soviet margins.
Anna Aliyeva is an art historian, senior researcher, and curator in the Department of 20th and 21st Century Art Studies at the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv. She has more than 10 years of experience working in the museum sphere, with a primary focus on of Ukrainian art during the Soviet period. Her research interests include working with art collections, both museum-based and private; revealing the interrelationship between art and power; narratives of art history through representation in museum exhibitions; uncovering neglected areas in the history of Ukrainian art of the 20th century, and the reasons for their exclusion. Anna practice includes expert work that reveals an art object’s provenance, authorship and authenticity, in particular regarding the regional school in the south of Ukraine. She lives and works in Kyiv.
Christianna Bonin teaches at the American University of Sharjah. Her research examines art institutions and education across imperial and Soviet-era Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, Clark Art Institute and Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture as well as an American University Faculty Research Grant. Christianna is the author of “The art of the Sixtiers in Soviet Kazakhstan, or How to Make a Portrait from a Skull” (2021), and she has contributed to Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide (Spring 2025). Her current book project, Soviet Orient: Art and Empire in Central Asia, 1900–1975, investigates Soviet cultural production in the region. Bonin’s curatorial projects include Art Dubai Modern 2024 and Lkham Gallery, the first international contemporary art gallery in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, where she was founding curator from 2022 to 2024. She has been a contributing critic at Artforum and serves on the advisory board of ARTMargins Online.
Inesa Brašiškė is an art historian and curator based in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her practice combines curatorial projects with scholarly research, focusing on modern and contemporary art from the Baltics and Eastern Europe since the 1960s. Her recent exhibitions include Eva Kot’átková: Interviews with the Monster (2025) and Eyes and Fields: Kazimiera Zimblytė and Rose Lowder (2025). Upcoming projects include a mid-career retrospective of Lithuanian artist Aurelija Maknytė and the first-ever major exhibition dedicated to avant-garde filmmaker and artist Marie Menken (1909-1970). Currently, Brašiškė serves as Head of Research and Curator at Sapieha Palace, a branch of the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. In this role, she develops a program of exhibitions and events, including the annual international Sapieha Palace Symposium. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications and art journals including Mousse Magazine, MoMA C-Map Post, and CAA News. Inesa has curated exhibitions and film programs at the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; MO Museum; e-flux screening room; and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. She was nominated for the ICI Curatorial Award in 2014, and her research has been supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, the ISLAA, the Getty Center, the College Art Association, and the Paul Mellon Centre.
Jonida Gashi is senior researcher at the Centre for Art Studies at the Academy of Sciences of Albania. Her research interests include contemporary art theory and criticism, film theory and the history of the cinema, and the artistic experience of post-socialism in contemporary Albania. Her monograph on the newsreels and documentary films of the Albanian communist show trials and their influence on Albanian socialist realist cinema was published by Pika pa sipërfaqe in 2025. She is currently working on a research project about the transformation of Albania in the 1990s, with a focus on the violent dismantling of the socialist heritage and the remodelling of the cultural, economic, and political spheres in line with the neoliberal paradigm. Gashi is editor-in-chief of the journal Studime për artin/Art Studies, which is published annually by the Academy of Albanian Studies. She is also one of the founders of DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art.
Uladzimir Hramovich is a Belarus born artist and curator who currently lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from the Gymnasium-College of Arts I.O. Akhremchik in Minsk (2009), and the graphics arts department of the Belarusian State Academy of Arts (2015). Since 2016 he has been a member of the Problem Collective since. Uladzimir works with installations, graphics and video. In his artistic practice, he draws on the history of modernist art and architecture, the history of ideology and political movements, and the transformation of urban space. He is interested in the tension between the past and the present, and he studies monuments and rituals of memory that are overdetermined by ideological meanings and embodied in material objects.
Raino Isto is an art historian, editor, artist, and curator currently based near Washington, DC. They are currently editor-in-chief at ARTMargins Online, and a member of the editorial board of ARTMargins print journal. They are a lecturer at University of Maryland, College Park, and American University. Their work has been published in Art History; Third Text; RACAR; ARTMargins; the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art; Science Fiction Studies; Extrapolation; the International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity; International Labor and Working-Class History; and The Getty Research Journal. Their work explores South-South cultural relations during the Cold War, aiming to rewrite dominant narratives of global socialist art, and examines the intersection of legacies of state socialism, antifascist activism, and anti-colonial struggle in contemporary art.
Erëmirë Krasniqi is an art writer, researcher and curator based in Prishtina, Kosovo. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Camera Austria, and frieze, among others. From February 2017 to January 2024, Erëmirë served as executive director of the Oral History Initiative, a research platform and open-access online archive that enables critical engagement with different forms of narration, recollection, and documentation. Concurrently, she has contributed to research projects with institutions such as the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, as curator of the Kosovo edition of the Secondary Archive, and with Muzeum Susch on research about European Women Artists. As an independent curator, she has led and curated projects for the National Gallery of Kosovo, the National Gallery of Arts in Albania, and the 39th EVA International, Ireland. Most notably, she curated the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo at the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, which received a Special Mention for National Participation. Currently, Erëmirë is a curatorial fellow at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin.
Zsuzsa László is a researcher and project leader at the Central European Research Institute for Art History in Budapest. She is a member of the editorial team of ARTMargins Online and a member of the board of tranzit/hu. She is currently working on two book projects: a volume of writings by and on the Hungarian art historian László Beke, and a book that explores how the concept of Eastern European art evolved in the context of transnational art events during the 1970s. Recent publications to which she has contributed include the Handbook of Socialist Exhibition Cultures (Toronto University Press, forthcoming), and “Regional Resonances: In Search of the Transnational in Central and Eastern European Art of the 1970s” (ARTMargins, 2024).
Alisa Lozhkina is a Ukrainian-born, California-based art historian, curator, and artist whose work bridges contemporary art and ancient spiritual traditions. She is the author of The Art of Ukraine (2024) and the Ukrainian translator of the Devi Mahatmya, a key Indian scripture on the feminine divine. She has also curated major exhibitions at leading international institutions. As an artist, Alisa creates quilts and dolls that function as contemporary icons and vessels for memory, spirit, and myth. Her practice moves between scholarship and shamanic imagination, stitching together worlds that modern culture has split apart.
Envera Moro is a researcher in art history and museum studies with experience in both museums and independent artistic initiatives. Originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, she has collaborated with local museum institutions and grassroots projects, often working at the intersection of memory and art, and is part of the team at the non-profit organization ŠTO TE NEMA as well as a member of the Balkan Museum Network. She is currently contributing an essay to a forthcoming Routledge anthology on contemporary Bosnian art while pursuing an MA in Museum Cultures with Collections Management at Birkbeck, University of London and an MA in Linguistics at the University of Sarajevo. Her research focuses on the relationship between museums, national memory, and contemporary artistic practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the broader Balkan region.
Asel Rashidova is a museum worker and researcher. She graduated from the Education in Museums and Heritage MA program that is run jointly by University of Glasgow, the University of Tartu, and Radboud University. Her thesis explored how fiction can function as a curatorial medium in historical museums in post-Soviet contexts, with a focus on Kyrgyzstan. Asel was part of the educational department of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), and the Esimde research platform. Alisa is a member of the Zamanbap Art Collective in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. In 2025, she curated an archival exhibition on the imaginary of Central Asia in contemporary art at the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Nare Sahakyan is an art historian, curator and researcher at the Ashot Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities in Yerevan, Armenia. Since 2021 she has been teaching several courses on art history at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Yerevan. Nare is currently the head of SAFA Boyajian Gallery in Yerevan. She received her MA degree in American University of Beirut with a thesis on “The Late Soviet Charm of Kantianism: Wilhelm Matevosyan’s Art History.” For the past five years she has done research at the Johannissyan Institute on the Armenian Apostolic Church and turn-of-the-century modernization processes in Armenia.
Susan Snodgrass is a Chicago-based critic and editor. She is Senior Editor for Special Projects at ARTMargins Online and a member of the publication’s Editorial Collective. She writes about contemporary art, public art and new commemorative art practices, as well as spatial politics and the built environment. She is the author of Inside the Matrix: The Radical Designs of Ken Isaacs (Half Letter Press, 2019) and is currently working on an expanded, second edition. Her articles have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Textile: Cloth and Culture, and in the e-journal Schools of Departure: Design and Art Pedagogies Beyond the Bauhaus. She is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her blog, In/Site: Reflections on the Art of Place, which explores the intersection between art, architecture, and urbanism, and a finalist for the 2019 Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation Arts Journalist Award.
Sven Spieker is a cultural and art historian whose research focuses on transnational modern and contemporary art, with a focus on Eastern Europe, Soviet and post-Soviet space, and Central Asia. Spieker has published on topics including the archive and contemporary media theory; destruction in art; the problem of acousmatic sound; as well as 19th- and 20th-century European literature and film. He is founding editor of ARTMargins Online and ARTMargins Print Journal as well as a co-founder of the Working Group Cultures of World Socialism and the Working Group Contemporary Art in Central Asia. Spieker’s most recent book publications are a co-edited volume about sound in art and culture (Akusmatik als Labor: Kultur/Kunst/Medien, ed. with Mario Asef, 2023) and the monograph Art as Demonstration: A Revolutionary Recasting of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2024). Forthcoming is Socialist Exhibition Cultures. International Art Exhibitions in the Socialist World, 1950-1990 (ed., Toronto University Press).
Tihomir Topuzovski teaches at the Institute of Social Sciences and the Humanities in Skopje, North Macedonia, and he is the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies in the Södertörn University in Stockholm. His research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, politics, environmental sciences, and the visual arts. Tihomir’s most recent work includes the monograph Postanarchism and Critical Art Practices (2024) and The Posthuman Pandemic (ed. with Saul Newman, 2021). His other recent articles include “Aesthetic Technique and Spatial Occupation in Hybrid Political Regimes” (2021), and the chapter “Political Protest, Temporary Urbanism and the Deactivation of Urban Spaces” (with L. Andres, 2020). He has organized and contributed to a number of artistic projects, including “Dis/Ordering the Art World” and “Landscape of Anxiety.” Tihomir is editor-in-chief of The Large Glass, a journal for contemporary art, culture, and theory.
Christopher Williams-Wynn is an art historian of modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on arts of the Americas and Europe in a global frame. His work often examines how media have been used to explore the epistemological claims, political consequences, and aesthetic implications of disciplinary knowledge and practice. Along these lines, his current book project examines the interfaces between art and systems thinking during the 1960s and 1970. Bridging Cold War divides, it argues that the turn towards systems thinking reshaped artistic practice, the terms of its criticism, and the methods of its display. Switching gears from systems to ecology, his next project draws on ecomedia theory and political economy to theorize contemporary art’s imbrication with the industrial operations, from mining to finance, that drive environmental devastation.
