Eastern European Pavilions at this Year’s Venice Biennale: Parsing the Contemporary

ARTMargins Online asked writers and critics close to the journal to respond to several Eastern European national pavilions at this year’s Venice Biennale. Our interest was in parsing the way in which pavilion curators approached the problem of nationhood and representation in a region caught between the Socialist past and an uncertain present marked by nationalism and neo-liberal economic policies. This series of responses is supplemented by an interview with Berlin-based artist Maria Loboda.

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Sven Spieker
Sven Spieker teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and specializes in modern and contemporary art, aesthetic and critical theory, and global and transnational art and art history. Spieker is the founding editor of ARTMargins and a co-founder of the Working Group Cultures of World Socialism. His book publications include The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press, 2008); Destruction (ed., MIT Press, 2017); Akusmatik als Labor: Kultur/Kunst/Medien (co-ed., Königshausen&Neumann, 2023); Art as Demonstration: A Revolutionary Recasting of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2024). Forthcoming: Socialist Exhibition Cultures. International Art Exhibitions in the Socialist World, 1950-1990 (ed., Toronto University Press).