Global and Forgotten Connections: The Circulation of Visual Arts Between Socialist European Countries and Asia, Latin America, and Africa during the Cold War”: International Conference at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, February 5–6, 2026
Focused on the global relationships between the states of the former Eastern Bloc and the so-called Third World during the Cold War, the conference Global and Forgotten Connections: the Circulation of Visual Arts Between Socialist European Countries and Asia, Latin America, and Africa during the Cold War accompanied the exhibition What Are Our Collective Dreams? Global Connections—Abandoned Friendships at Zachęta National Gallery of Art (October 17, 2025 – February 8, 2026) and was prepared by curators Taras Gembik, Joanna Kordjak, and Antonina Stebur. It was a research-driven curatorial project questioning artistic, institutional, and ideological exchanges that connected Poland—particularly through the former Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions (CBWA)—with regions of what is now often termed the Global South, including Latin America, India, Vietnam, and Palestine. The exhibition combined archival materials regarding past international exhibitions and artistic projects with contemporary installations and interventions. In revisiting the Cold War’s forgotten cultural alliances, this “activated archive” wasn’t nostalgic but rather asked how these histories continue to shape our presence, incorporating themes such as migration, labor precarity, exploitation of natural resources, violence and xenophobia. Participating artists included Ibrahim Mahama, Marina Naprushkina, Marysia Lewandowska, Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ and Ahmet Öğüt who explored themes of identity, memory, and political imagination. The exhibition’s emphasis on shared pasts and future solidarities, and particularly on the connections between socialist Poland and the Global South, was supplemented by the aforementioned conference, with twenty-five participants from over ten countries across four continents.
Although not per se “interdisciplinary”, and although the majority of papers were grounded in art history, the conference demonstrated a significant shift in Central and Eastern European scholarship of the post-1945 period: Rather than focusing on dominant Cold War narratives and local concerns, its contributors expanded the scope of their research across transoceanic spaces to other continents. Correspondingly, the conference was not structured around a single research problem; rather, it sought to function as a broad forum for the exchange of knowledge about this relatively new field of research. For scholars from Central and Eastern Europe, such engagement remains difficult, not least because of the still limited infrastructure supporting international research mobility, including travel funding. It is therefore a considerable achievement of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art that it was able to realize the exhibition and conference as part of a unified project.
Particularly striking at the conference was the wide range of directions in which current research is developing, from the expansion of exhibition history studies of the former Eastern Bloc to investigations of collaborations between socialist artists and institutions and the so-called Third World, often informed by decolonial theory.
Most of the papers presented on the first day focused on international exhibitions or on the trajectories of specific artists in a global perspective. The keynote was fittingly delivered by Gabriela Świtek, professor at the Institute of Art History of the University of Warsaw, who conducted extensive research on exhibitions organized in communist Poland by the so-called Centralne Biurze Wystaw Artystycznych (Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions, CBWA) between 1949–1970, with the results accessible on Zachęta’s website. Świtek’s intervention allowed participants to gain a comprehensive overview of the many international connections cultivated by this official institution tasked with organizing exhibitions for the state both at home and abroad.
International Conference. Global and Forgotten Connections: the Circulation of Visual Arts Between Socialist European Countries and Asia, Latin America and Africa During the Cold War, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, 5 – 6 February 2026, Photo. N. Gawryś, Z. Sękowska / Zachęta Archive, CC BY-SA
The detailed research Terezie Nekvindová, a scholar based at the VVP AVU Research Center of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, illustrated how difficult it is to conduct research on art exhibitions sent abroad from Czechoslovakia, precisely because of the absence of any institution comparable to the CBWA. In her contribution entitled “A Distributed Exhibition State: Institutional Conditions of Organising Exhibitions Abroad in Czechoslovakia”, Nekvindová noted that during the second half of the twentieth century, there existed an often changing network of institutions engaged in such activities.
In her important contribution entitled “Institution as Quilt: Global Transfers at the Galeria Studio in Warsaw”, Dorota Jarecka, a member of the Institute of Literary Research at the Polish Academy of Science, introduced the visual metaphor of the “crazy quilt.” Unlike traditional quilts, which are typically constructed from regularly repeated geometric blocks, a “crazy” quilt is deliberately irregular in both structure and visual logic. This distinctive style of textile composition can serve as a metaphor of the chaotic nature of the global and forgotten connections during the Cold War.
The conference’s second and third panels were devoted to the relationships between socialist countries and Asia, naturally addressing Vietnamese art, as for example in Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ’s paper “The Socialist Post-colonial Moment: Vietnamese Art in Zachęta in the 1950s.” An additional regional perspective, by Hatice Özdogan Türkyilmaz, another scholar based at Freie Universität Berlin, analyzed the participation of artists from socialist European countries in the first International Istanbul Biennials. Another outstanding paper was delivered by by Wiktoria Szczupacka, the conference’s main organizer and a member of the Zachęta’s team, entitled “Between the People’s Republic of Poland and India: Women Artists, Feminism, and the Exhibition at the BWA Gallery in Bydgoszcz in 1988”. Szczupacka recalled an almost forgotten exhibition of Indian women artists in Poland that presented forty-one women artists, including key figures in Indian art history, and examined it against the backdrop of a fascinating personal experience that began with a family photo album.
Simone Wille, based at Institute of Art History of the University of Innsbruck and author of the recent book Cold War Art Worlds. South Asian Art and Artists in Prague. 1947-1989, focused on the trajectory of the Pakistani artist Shakir Ali whose career unfolded during the post-colonial era. In her paper “South Asian art and artists in Central Europe: 1947–1989”, she highlighted how powerful personal stories played out within the confines of the Cold War, and how artists from emerging countries benefited from opportunities to study in European centers, even as these opportunities could sometimes become perilous. Such moments also surfaced in other contributions that traced the personal trajectories of individual artists through microhistories, such as for example in Katarzyna Falecka’s contribution “On artistic exchanges between Algeria and the former Eastern Bloc.”
The final panel of the first day of the conference was devoted to relationships with Africa. Particularly noteworthy here was the paper by Maja and Reuben Fowkes, the founders of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art and the Postsocialist Art Center (PACT), drawing on a recent personal visit to Ethiopia as part of their current research project “The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA)“. The Fowkes examined the role sculptors from socialist countries played in the construction of four public monuments in Addis Ababa between the 1950s and the 1980s, as well as their present-day fate, asking how socialist artists negotiated monument-building as a gesture of internationalist solidarity and what forms of decolonization were at stake in memorial sites of imperial anti-fascism and the Soviet leader cult in the only African country that was never colonized.
The panel concluded with Paulina Banas’s paper “Publishing Living Egypt on Both Sides of the Cold War: Paul Strand’s Photography and the Networks of 1960s Art Publishing”. Banas is an assistant professor of Art History of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and she focused on a lesser-known episode in Strand’s career and his attempts to publish a book of photographs about Egypt in Eastern bloc. Banas’s talk diverged somewhat from others in its emphasis on East–West relations, although it developed its argument from the fascinating attempt by a Western artist to publish in the East. With this case study, Banas was able to demonstrate how difficult it was to “penetrate the East.”
Each panel was followed by a lively discussion that opened a range of questions regarding the nature of solidarity at the time. Participants reflected on the tensions between nationalist and internationalist tendencies in former socialist countries, their globalizing ambitions, as well as their transformed colonizing impulses. The discussion also touched upon questions of split realities, the dislocation of artists from former East and former Third World countries, and their marginalization within global art histories.
The second day shifted the conference’s focus toward Latin America, opening with Agata Jakubowska’s paper “Exhibitions of Mexican Women Artists in Europe: Feminism and Cultural Diplomacy”, where she analyzed an exhibition of Mexican women artists in four Polish cities in 1981 from a feminist perspective. Jakubowska, based at the Institute of Art History of the University of Warsaw is a leading feminist art historian in Poland. Another scholar from Poland, Karolina Zychowicz, who is based at the Institute of Art History of the University of Wrocław, juxtaposed the impact of the travelling exhibition of Mexican art across the Eastern Bloc in 1955 and compared it with the show’s presentation in China, where censorship intervened to ban certain works. In her paper entitled “Mexican Art as a Catalyst for Change: Exhibitions in Warsaw (1955) and Beijing (1956)”, Zychowicz demonstrated, among other things, the influence of Mexican art on local artists and the longevity of this artistic fascination.
Jorge M. Sanguino, a PhD candidate from University of Cologne, highlighted the legacy of Polish-born artist Marcos Kurtycz over three decades of contemporary Mexican art. Meanwhile Heloisa Espada, professor of Art History based at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, focused on the fate of the Hungarian artist Kázmér Fejér and the connections between abstractionism in Brazil and in Central Europe. Rada Georgieva, a PhD candidate from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, examined the trajectory of the Brazilian Bulgarian-born sculptor Liuba Wolf and her involvement with the São Paulo Biennial. The São Paulo Biennial also served as the point of departure for another paper, in which Rado Ištok, curator of the National Gallery in Prague, reconstructed the Czechoslovak participation in the 10th Biennial de São Paulo. Based on detailed research, his paper illuminated previously unknown circumstances surrounding this successful participation and its political background.
International Conference. Global and Forgotten Connections: the Circulation of Visual Arts Between Socialist European Countries and Asia, Latin America and Africa During the Cold War, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, 5 – 6 February 2026, Photo. N. Gawryś, Z. Sękowska / Zachęta Archive, CC BY-SA.
The afternoon panel further directed attention to the relationships between socialist countries and Latin America. In Juliane Debeusscher’s paper “Multidirectional Realisms: Antonio Berni in Socialist Europe (1956–1966)” the focus turned toward the influence of artists from the region on the art of socialist Europe. Debeusscher is a Ramón y Cajal post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Art History of the UNED in Madrid and she has conducted wide-ranging research on the central-European connections with France, Spain, and Latin America during and after the Cold War. The Argentine painter Antonio Berni at the center of Debeusscher’s talk was an important figure within the so-called figurative narration that resonated strongly in Central Europe during the 1960s. Due to the artist’s social and political activism he was officially accepted and given solo exhibitions in many European countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
In her paper “Cultural Anthropophagy: Angelo de Aquino’s Decolonial Dialogue with the Polish Artist Jarosław Kozłowski”, Katarzyna Cytlak, a scholar now based at Nicolaus Copernicus University Toruń, traced the influence of the Brazilian artist Ângelo de Aquino on the Polish art scene. Personal narratives were also central to the contributions by Diego Renart González (University of the Basque Country) and Dorota Jagoda Michalska (Central European University, Vienna/Budapest). González examined the fate of the banned exhibition of the Dominican artist Silvano Lora in Warsaw in 1972, while Michalska focused on projects by the Polish artist Władysław Hasior in Montevideo, Uruguay. Independent curator and researcher based in Berlin, Katerina Valdivia Bruch, in her paper “Third World Solidarity: Transnational Cultural Encounters in 1970s Peru”, addressed the cultural policies of the military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1968–1975), exploring how Third Worldism and non-alignment influenced Peru’s economic, political, and cultural agenda. Bruch usefully posed questions that were further developed, for instance, in Zsuzsa László paper “Divergent Attempts Towards a Transregional Profile of Art” that focused on an exhibition of Hungarian art at CAYC in Buenos Aires in 1973. Daniel Grúň, an art historian based in Bratislava and the head of the Július Koller Society, symbolically engaged with the question of a “cosmic utopia” as a critique of Cold War ideology through the works of Slovak artists including Stano Filko and Július Koller.
Even as most of the above-mentioned papers were narrowly focused case studies, the second conference day revealed the richness of the cultural contacts between Poland and other Eastern European countries with Latin America. A significant role in this exchange was undoubtedly played by the São Paulo Biennial, which from 1957 onwards also opened itself to countries of the former Soviet Bloc, contributing substantially to the internationalization of the art scenes of Eastern European countries. Their shared peripheral modernization placed Latin America and Eastern Europe in a comparable position with regard to state policies and industrialization. This affinity helped foster cultural ties and artistic exchanges that shaped a strong current of solidarity between Europe and Latin America.
Summarizing the important contribution made by this conference, we can note above all that it reflects a notable shift in attention by scholars from Central and Eastern Europe toward developments beyond the boundaries of this region. Their interest no longer moves along the one-way street that, in art historical research, once led from the countries of the former Eastern Bloc to the West, and instead now extends in multiple directions. After a period in which the art history of the region emancipated itself in the spirit of Piotr Piotrowski’s concept of “horizontal art history” and focused on identifying specificities within the region and on their mutual comparison, research is now turning toward distant geographies, uncovering previously unknown connections, infrastructures, as well as marginalized artists and artistic practices. Noticeable is also a growth in the number of scholars from outside the region who research Central and Eastern European art history after 1945.
International Conference. Global and Forgotten Connections: the Circulation of Visual Arts Between Socialist European Countries and Asia, Latin America and Africa During the Cold War, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, 5 – 6 February 2026, Photo. N. Gawryś, Z. Sękowska / Zachęta Archive, CC BY-SA.
This conference provided a unique opportunity to meet and discuss these new perspectives. Many papers reconstructed remarkable personal networks and overlooked stories of collaboration, framed by fascinating case studies of forgotten exhibitions that brought to light marginalized art from different parts of the world. It became clear in the course of these two days that the program of the conference, which was organized geographically, enabled a focused engagement with a particular segment of problems offered by this “crazy quilt”. In the concluding discussion, participants duly raised questions about the significance of this type of research. Alongside the necessity of filling numerous blank spaces in global art histories, attention was given to the impact of migration and international exposure on the work of individual artists, as well as to the now-challenged assumption that the Iron Curtain was impermeable.
The central theme of the concluding discussion, however, was the relationship of the former Soviet Bloc countries with the so-called Third World and its emerging nations, as well as the sensitivities they developed as part of their historical experience with the Soviet model of governance and the socialist version of imperialism. Clearly, their own experience of marginalization within global art histories provides scholars from Central and Eastern Europe with a distinctive capacity to approach the subject with openness and an inherent empathy.
