Return to Order: Art and National Populism in Eastern Europe: A Roundtable of the Concerned (Part One)

Hosted across ARTMargins Online and ARTMargins Print Journal, this roundtable brings together art critics, cultural managers, and curators from Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Romania, Albania, North Macedonia, and Poland to discuss the impact of populist leadership on the art and cultural lives of their respective countries.(Part 2 will be published in an upcoming issue of ARTMargins Print Journal. The uneven representation of contributors across countries is not premeditated but reflects the contingencies of the editorial process.)

National, or right-wing populism, to use the distinction made in political theory,(For a left, and right-wing populism see the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in particular Laclau, On Populist Reason (2005), and Mouffe, For a Left Populism (2018).) took shape in Eastern Europe as a delayed response to the perceived failures of liberal democracy and the uneven impacts of the post-socialist transition. The latter, initially hailed as a “return to Europe” and reintegration into democratic and market-based structures, soon exposed deep social, economic, and cultural fractures. The capitalist transition fueled disillusionment with political elites, the free market, and rising inequality; with migrant “issues”; with dissatisfaction over the treatment of gender and sexuality; and with the so-called “loss of sovereignty” to Brussels institutions. Eastern Europe is certainly not unique in this respect. Some EU-15 countries—the countries that were members of the EU prior to its 2004 expansion—had seen the rise of national populism even before. The Freedom Party in Austria, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, Lega Nord in Italy, and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France (which was founded in 1972) are examples of those who opposed the European Union’s liberal values as early as the 1990s. The presence of right-wing populism is not unique to Eastern Europe, but it resonates most strongly in the former socialist countries due to their totalitarian history. What makes national populism there particularly captivating is its promise to overturn history and return to “national sovereignty,” “strong leaders,” “order,” and “traditional values.” The latest wave of “returns to order” has resurrected half-forgotten banners such as the “Golden Epoch of Ceaușescu” in Romania, “Kádár’s Goulash Communism” in Hungary, East German Ostalgie, and yearnings for “Tito’s Time” in the former Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, a chilling revival of mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism is unfolding beyond the easternmost margins of Europe, accompanied by warfare on the scale of World War II, now conducted with AI-guided drones.

This roundtable discussion, initiated in late 2025 but prolonged into the summer of 2026 amid rapidly changing political conjunctures, aims to explore the phenomenon of national populism in Eastern Europe from a cultural and artistic perspective. It approaches Eastern Europe as a case study, hoping to catch, as if within a glass sphere, a glimpse of the impact and consequences of right-wing populism on a broader global scale. The region can serve as a prism for observing the unresolved contradictions of the post–Cold War liberal world order and its predominant narratives of “transition to democracy,” “neoliberalism,” “post-socialism,” and the “end of history.” Here, conservative populism shows that it can take various forms: either in the crude form of early twentieth-century “return to order” authoritarianism or, conversely, as a reactionary inversion, if not a culmination, of glossy contemporary neoliberalism that seeks to conceal the deep structural inequalities it has created. In most cases, it draws on the figure of the charismatic leader.

For political thinkers, populism—whether on the left or the right—is primarily concerned with exploiting the sharp economic and political divide between the people and the elites. We aim to explore this claim by examining its manifestations in the field of cultural and artistic production, institutions, and symbolic economies. We might even pose this inquiry as a question about the “cultural logic” or the “aesthetics” of national populism, with the quotation marks signaling a deliberate critical distance and an uncertainty regarding the relevance of these theoretically charged terms today. Our focus is on right-wing populism, not only because it has become a dominant trend in many former socialist countries, but also because this trajectory threatens to persist and potentially undo the gains in personal and collective liberties achieved over recent decades. Whether these gains could have been fully achieved under the primacy of the free market, without reverting to authoritarianism, remains an open question.

Octavian Esanu, ed.

Question 1

Octavian Esanu: From your experience in the field, and if you agree with the overall articulation given in the short introduction, how do you perceive the impact of national populism on knowledge and cultural production in your immediate context? What would you identify as some of the main indicators?

Suzana Milevska (North Macedonia): I want to clarify my position from the outset: although I generally agree with the propositions so clearly laid out in the introduction, in my view, the relation between national populism and cultural and artistic production—either on the left or the right—is not a one-way street. I would not so easily absolve the arts from their voluntary implication in multiple aspects of national populism. I would instead propose disentangling the impact and complicity of artists and artistic practices, art institutions, and cultural workers from various populist movements, as well as the consequences of their contributions to populist sentiments—for example, when addressing national identity as an important aspiration. To a certain extent, populist-inflected artistic practices were overlooked in art history and theory due to the complex interweaving of local macrohistories with microhistories, particularly in ex-Yugoslavia (and the ex-Yugoslav states, such as my own country, North Macedonia, which gained its independence after the war and the dissolution of the multi-ethnic socialist Yugoslav state). I suggest that critical analysis can unravel the complex reciprocal relationship that may have helped, and even initiated, the dismantling of the long-celebrated slogan of “brotherhood and unity” between different nations and “nationalities” (a term preferred over “ethnic minorities” in ex-Yugoslavia). I propose distinguishing at least three phases and specific points of intersection between right-wing national populism and the arts in ex-Yugoslavia and North Macedonia. I find these three phases equally relevant to the overall topic of this discussion because they are entwined and reciprocal, and they shed more light on the relationship between art, culture, and national populism—something that is nothing new in my region.

The first phase of this complex entwinement emerged well before the breakup of Yugoslavia, from the mid-1980s to the start of the armed conflicts in the early 1990s. Given the proximity of certain artistic movements to national populist movements, it is particularly germane to our inquiry to examine closely the role of multiple artistic phenomena during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Some ambiguous artistic inquiries into historical events referring to national identity and geopolitical changes from the past, which initiated new nationalist discourses in the late 1980s, became an intricate part of nationalist, politically driven state projects. Such art projects—engaging and communicating with the public more easily than political elites—became dependent on and were controlled by their service to governmental cultural policies, which were overbearing and confrontational. This made them easily corruptible. Once seen as a liberating force, these projects soon became conservative and reactionary and, after the breakup of ex-Yugoslavia, even collaborated with local right-wing parties and power-grabbing actors.

The problem of constructing a subject and the representation of national identity were important issues in many artworks and projects produced between the mid-1980s and early 1990s in North Macedonia (then the Republic of Macedonia). The emergence of a new generation of artists brought new artistic tendencies and interests in diverse themes and media (e.g., antiquity, Byzantine art, local folklore, and craft). Their inclination toward a postmodern rethinking of figurative representation—following German Neo-Expressionism and Italian Transavanguardia—and their interest in nationalist themes significantly transformed the Macedonian art scene. The interest in Christian and Byzantine iconography, and the flirtation with its symbols and patterns, gradually came to dominate painting, sculpture, and installation as early signs of newly awakened interests in local cultural and national identity, contrasting with the cosmopolitan sentiments characteristic of previous modernist periods. (Ironically, the Byzantine Empire was the hegemonic conqueror and oppressor in local history.)

This new focus on mixed local cultural and artistic traditions resulted in an abundance of topics related to the local heroic past (mostly drawn from periods of insurgency against Ottoman rule), religious symbolism and iconography, as well as the use of national state insignia. These elements were populist in themselves and aligned with nationalistic discourses that eventually contributed to the dissolution of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.

The second phase of the intersection between art and national populism took place during the initial stages of the struggle for independence and the transition from a centralized socialist economy to a liberal post-socialist economy. The transition  functioned as a contradictory facilitator that offered proxy support to newly emerged democracies paradoxically equipped with alleged patriotic references to the partially capitalist pre-Yugoslav past.

The third phase is marked by the recent return of national populism, which has turned into a full-blown neoliberal/illiberal right-wing manifesto.

Barbora Kundračíková (Czechia): On the contrary, in the Czech cultural context, national populism has not, until recently, manifested itself as an explicit ideological project or a coherent state aesthetic. Rather than operating primarily through direct censorship, as it does now, it has worked through a gradual reconfiguration of the conditions under which cultural production can be considered legitimate, useful, and publicly defensible. A fairly telling example can be found in the increasing number of competitions for more or less national monuments. One of them is somewhat surprising—the Marian Column on Prague’s Old Town Square (2020).

But probably the most visible indicator of the current situation is the systematic weakening of expertise, which is intensified by growing administration and a heightened demand for measurable outputs, paradoxically accompanied by a long-term decline in public investment in culture. The one percent of the annual national budget that was set as a desirable goal in the early 1990s is now nothing more than a pipe dream. Under these conditions, institutions are left with limited time, resources, and attention to engage with structurally complex questions, which applies not only to the flagship of all concerns, the National Gallery in Prague, but also to smaller regional institutions.

This (anti)system really functions through the lack of willingness to make decisions, to project a coherent trajectory, and through the normalization of an anti‑intellectual discourse that opposes “common sense” to expertise and the figure of the “ordinary visitor” to allegedly detached cultural elites. This logic gradually constricts the space for critical cultural production without the need for formal suppression.

For this reason, Czech national populism could be described less as a fixed aesthetic than as an “aesthetic of rejection.” It does not promote one dominant style. Instead, it defines legitimate culture negatively—against what is labelled as too idealistic, too conceptual, too activist, or simply too “detached.” In public and social media debates, this logic is often expressed through appeals to common sense, authenticity, comprehensibility, or—my favourite—the “humanistic” character of culture. At the same time, we objectively and consistently monitor data, attendance, all measurable metrics, and, above all, deadlines. The result is precisely what aligns with Tomáš Kulka’s principles of kitsch aesthetics.

The political shift after the 2025 parliamentary elections has made these dynamics more visible. The formation of a government led by the ANO (“Yes”) party—a populist movement founded in 2011 by businessman Andrej Babiš—with smaller but right‑populist and nationalistic coalition partners has intensified a sense of alarm within the cultural field. But is it already national populism as such? What it certainly means is the destruction of the system that has been built since 1989. The devaluation of culture as a form of public knowledge, and the normalization of conformity, lead institutions to avoid difficult questions even before they are ever explicitly forbidden to ask them.

This dynamic precedes and exceeds moments in which visual culture, literature, and public media become subject to explicit pressure—Czech Television and Czech Radio are currently on strike alert due to a planned change in funding—which ultimately only reinforces what was said earlier. In this situation, we are once again faced with the choice of whether to remain within the system—in an effort not to give up on it prematurely—or to call outright for open resistance, to which, in fact, most institutions are not yet willing to respond. Real-world action is being replaced by online activity, mass protests without real impact, and an aestheticization of action that we ultimately see elsewhere as well.

Karolina Łabowicz-Dymanus (Poland): The impact of national populism on cultural production in Poland cannot be adequately understood through the lens of ideological reaction alone. A more precise analysis requires attention to what Isabell Lorey, extending Foucauldian governmentality, has termed “governmental precarization”—the deployment of insecurity not as a policy failure, but as a productive technique of governance that generates specific dispositions: anxiety, dependency, flexibility, and availability for political incorporation. Precarization, in this framing, does not merely deprive subjects of stability; it constitutes them as governable through their very instability.

Poland’s cultural sector entered the post-1989 period positioned at the base of the salary hierarchy. For decades, cultural workers—including those holding doctoral degrees—earned wages approximating the statutory minimum. This was not accidental neglect but a structural effect of the neoliberal transition, which treated culture as a residual category unworthy of systematic investment. Museums, galleries, academies, and public universities became sites of chronic underinvestment. In Gramscian terms, these conditions prepared the terrain for a “war of position”—the strategy of securing hegemony not through direct state seizure but through the incremental conquest of civil society institutions (education, culture, media, religion) where consent is organized prior to and independent of the coercive apparatus.

When PiS, Poland’s right‑wing populist Law and Justice party, won an outright parliamentary majority in 2015 (a majority of seats in the Sejm secured on roughly 38 percent of the vote) and governed until 2023, it enacted substantial wage increases across the public sector, including culture, education, and research institutions such as the Polish Academy of Sciences. For thousands of workers, this constituted the first experience of being rendered economically visible by state power. The crux is this: Lorey’s precarized subjects—constituted through decades of governmental neglect as anxious, dependent, and flexible—became available for Gramscian hegemonic incorporation precisely because material dependency overrode ideological commitment. Sectors presumed to be liberal proved to be economically abandoned—and thus available for political realignment through redistributive recognition.

This redistributive strategy operated as a form of deliberate political capture, targeting structurally vulnerable groups that liberal formations had neglected while upholding market-driven policies. The result overturns assumptions about the inherent progressivism of cultural and academic fields: material conditions, not ideological affinity, determined political orientation.

Simultaneously, the authoritarian drift accompanying this redistribution reshaped knowledge production through several mechanisms: the restructuring of funding bodies (National Institute of Humanities, National Center for Culture) via ideological filters; the political appointment of institutional leadership at National Museums, the Center for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle, and Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź; and anticipatory self-discipline among curators and researchers who internalize a risk calculus as a survival strategy. Critical scholarship—gender studies, decolonial research, and contested memory politics—has been systematically marginalized.

Hungary under Orbán, offered a structurally distinct but functionally analogous case: rather than a redistributive capture, it involves institutional monopolization through the constitutionally-protected Hungarian Academy of Arts, which absorbs disproportionate funding while independent workers face intensified precarity. Both modalities exploit precarization as the enabling condition for hegemonic repositioning.

The “cultural logic” of national populism thus operates through the reconfiguration of material and institutional conditions that determine what is possible, permissible, and fundable within the cultural field.

Kristóf Nagy (Hungary): Hungary was, until recently, in the “avant-garde” of the phenomena that the introduction to this roundtable identifies as “national populism.” Between 2010 and 2026, Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary was in power for sixteen consecutive years, making Hungary an ideal case for studying the ways in which state-led national populist powers engage with cultural production—in contrast to other countries where such forces have only recently come to power or are close to a breakthrough. In this sense, the Hungarian case can be understood as a story of consolidation through which we can think about how such a regime transforms cultural apparatuses once its time has come.(This response was written at the turn of 2025–2026, a few months before April 2026, when Viktor Orbán was defeated in a landslide. Following Orbán’s electoral defeat, previously marginalized, predominantly liberal figures in Hungary’s art field began rapidly re-professionalizing themselves by breathing life into old institutions and establishing new professional associations, with the declared goal of shaping post-Orbán cultural policy. The new government, so far, appears receptive to their demands. While the ultimate outcomes remain unpredictable, these developments do not seem to overwrite this analysis of Orbán’s cultural politics to date but rather raise questions about the depth and success of its hegemonic ambitions—not only in capturing but also in profoundly transforming the field of cultural production. They may also draw our attention to how the country’s economic stagnation after 2020 undermined the co-optation of art workers and, more broadly, the social foundations of the regime’s stability.)

Let’s start with a provocative fact: after coming to power, Orbán’s regime quickly doubled the share of governmental cultural spending in proportion to the total governmental expenditure from 1% to 2%, making it one of the highest in the entire European Union. This fact helped debunk the myth that such regimes are anti-cultural. This leads to the really important question as to what kind of culture is being produced, and how this is connected to the consolidation of national-populist regimes? When I look around at the artists, intellectuals, and cultural producers in Hungary around me, I see mostly resentment and resignation. Resignation is especially important in this regard, as it signals that the regime has achieved something: hegemonic power over the field of cultural production. At the same time, such hegemony was not built solely on coercion: the above-mentioned increase in governmental cultural spending was also a way to co-opt artists, intellectuals, and cultural producers.

Understanding these Hungarian dynamics matters beyond the country’s borders because they represent not a Hungarian disease or a post-socialist burden, but rather a template for cultural consolidation under national populism more broadly. As the introduction to this roundtable also stresses, such processes are not only present in the post-socialist space; there are parallel trends in the far-right tide in many Western European countries as well as the United States. For this reason, I believe that understanding what has happened in Hungary over the last sixteen years can also serve as a test case to understand how the global far-right will shape arts and culture. I am currently working on a book project provisionally titled Waging Art: Artists and the Far-Right in the Global Culture Wars that aims to provide an account of these processes from a global perspective. This does not mean, however, that we should expect any copy-and-paste from the Hungarian playbook. If we look at how cultural institutions have been transformed during Trump’s second presidency we witness at least as many differences as similarities, emerging both from the different role of state patronage in the United States compared to Hungary, and from the very different global reach of the two states.

Capitoline She Wolf (Lupa Capitolina), Cluj Napoca, Romania. Photograph by Codrin Bucur, 2012. © Codrin Bucur. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 3.0 Romania (CC BY SA 3.0 RO). The Lupa Capitolina—depicting a she wolf nursing Romulus and Remus—was widely adopted in Romania as a symbol of Roman origin and Latin continuity, affirming the nation’s cultural and historical genealogy through Rome.

Cristian Nae (Romania): In Romania, national populism has a convoluted genealogy. Some of its visual and symbolic foundations can be traced back to nineteenth-century attempts to portray the nation through markers of national identity such as folk costumes and Christianity. It first emerged as a political and cultural instrument in the 1930s, when fascist propaganda mobilized it against an alleged “internal enemy,” identified as the Jewish upper-middle class, which was portrayed as the oppressor of the impoverished Romanian peasantry. Antisemitic caricatures were frequently published in press outlets run by far-right movements such as Sfarmă-Piatră (The Stone-Crusher), Porunca Vremii (The Command of the Times), and Pământul Strămoșesc (The Ancestral Land). These publications disseminated a toxic blend of radical nationalism and mystical-religious ideology. This discourse was strongly inflected by religion, with Christian Orthodoxy promoted as a defining marker of national identity.

After 1974, Ceaușescu’s turn toward “national communism”(Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).) revived a different but related narrative: that of an uninterrupted autochthonous presence on the territory of present-day Romania since the Dacians (mobilized to exclude any foreign cultural elements), coupled with the instrumentalization of folk culture as a foundation of national identity. This became paramount in state-supported art exhibitions of the 1980s, including depictions of historical myths by regime favorites such as Sabin Bălașa. Alongside him, artists like Traian Brădean contributed to a genre of “engaged realism” (a term coined by Magda Cârneci),(Magda Cârneci, Artele plastice în România 1945-1989: Cu o addenda 1990-2010 (Iași: Polirom, 2013).) often focusing on heroic portraiture and scenes of national struggle. This ideological framework was further expanded through the “Cântarea României” (Song to Romania), a nationwide state-organized mass cultural festival designed to blur the line between professional artists and “the masses.” The festival instrumentalized folk culture by promoting a sanitized version of national identity meticulously crafted through widespread institutions such as the Popular Schools of Art. These institutions fostered a surge in naïve art, with artists like Maria Trifu and Gheorghe Clit being awarded prizes for works that depicted a rural, idyllic Romania.

Alexandru Podea, The Call of the Ancestors (Chemarea Străbunilor), 2024. Iași, Romania. Public installation. Photograph by Cristian Nae. The work reflects on labor migration through nationalist and ancestral imagery, framing emigration as a rupture in collective identity and rural life.

Many of the key tropes structuring contemporary national-populist cultural production closely resemble these earlier formations. Orthodox religiosity, Dacian—or, more broadly, ancestral—heritage, and various folk traditions continue to serve as central reference points, though they are reassembled today in a modified constellation within the Union of Fine Artists and promoted through art exhibitions programmed by local, less prominent art museums. These tropes are further reinforced by a new wave of monumental sculptures of historical figures, commissioned by local authorities. The renewed emphasis on monumentalism reflects a broader effort to reassert symbolic authority through visible, durable markers of historical continuity. The current conservative turn is further fueled by anti-EU sentiments articulated through the language of anti-colonial critique.

At the same time, a more subtle alignment has taken shape between segments of the middle class and global capital, visible in the proliferation of clusters of private art galleries that promote aesthetic objects largely disengaged from recent political transformations, with the partial exception of a loosely articulated concern for environmental issues. A rediscovered materiality and a new objecthood—articulated through techno-organic hybrid assemblages and surfaces, alongside an “aesthetics of atmosphere,” the everlasting lure of painting predicated on its indexicality, and the ubiquity of sensory art installations—are key elements in this revival. These elements ultimately serve the accumulation of capital through art fairs such as Art Safari (an exhibition platform commercially curated in central Bucharest) or RAD Art Fair (a gallery‑driven contemporary art fair focused on emerging and mid‑career artists). Such formats are unwittingly part of a broader process of depoliticization, co‑opting precarious artists and taming any efforts to participate in today’s social transformations, thereby bolstering the populist agenda by canceling any true political antagonism.

Photograph of Downtown One Tirana, Tirana, Albania. Photograph by Jonida Gashi, 2026. Designed by the Dutch architectural studio MVRDV, the building is notable for its façade, which is meant to evoke a “pixelated” map of Albania.

Jonida Gashi (Albania): I should begin by noting that national populism never took hold in post-socialist Albania in the way that it has done in so many neighboring countries, both in the Balkans and in the rest of Europe. The reasons for this are complex, I believe, and they have as much to do with the past as with the present. Its status as an irregularity in the region is probably what makes Albania an interesting case study. Thus, while Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister since 2013, is undoubtedly a populist leader, he has mostly steered clear of the sort of rabid anti-immigrant, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric that is typically associated with national populism. On the other hand, Rama’s alliances with nationalist, right-wing, and downright (neo-) fascist leaders in the region—from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni—as well as his vocal support for Israel’s genocidal regime, tell a different story. This affinity may be explained in part by Rama’s economic policies, which have always been on the right—Rama having been a champion of neoliberal reform since the beginnings of his political career in the late 1990s—even though he is nominally a “socialist.” His affinity for this political constellation may also represent the logical endpoint of a political project inspired by Tony Blair’s New Labour and Third Way politics more generally. Rama’s Rilindja movement—which, since 2013, has sought to engineer a “renaissance” across politics, economics, and culture—is deeply rooted in the idea of a “post-ideological” age, so popular in the 1990s following the defeat of socialism in Eastern Europe. In reality, the erosion of the traditional differences between the left and the right, in conjunction with the global ascendancy of neoliberalism, has led to an unmistakable shift of political discourse toward the right.

Photograph of Tirana’s Rock (Skanderbeg Building), Tirana, Albania. Photograph by Jonida Gashi, 2026. Designed by Dutch architectural studio MVRDV, the building’s outline is meant to evoke a bust of Albania’s national hero, Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg, a medieval warrior and leader renowned for fending off invading Ottoman armies in the mid‑fifteenth century. As many commentators have pointed out, however, the silhouette also bears a striking resemblance to Edi Rama.

My point here is that we should not expect to encounter right-wing populism only in its classical, i.e., conservative/nationalist form. If we do, we run the risk of not recognizing forms of right-wing populism that present themselves differently—i.e., as cosmopolitan/internationalist—but that are just as dangerous. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why Rama has for so long been able to escape criticism of his increasingly authoritarian leadership, the suppression of any critical voices within the country, and his astronomically corrupt governance.

The above dynamics are particularly visible in the architectural sector, where in the past decade there has been a return to nationalist tropes and symbols, used to push through neoliberal development projects. Thus, one prominent vehicle for the proliferation of nationalist tropes and symbols in the Albanian urban landscape is the new high‑rises being built around the capital, Tirana, as part of a construction boom driven by the Albanian government, with the prime minister himself at the center. Often designed by famous architects, these buildings feature elements such as the portrait of Albania’s national hero or the map of Albania on their façades—as in the case of Skanderbeg Tower and Downtown One Tirana, respectively. Both were designed by the Dutch architectural studio MVRDV, whose founder, Winy Maas, also happens to be a close collaborator of the prime minister. These development projects have contributed to the privatization of public land and served as catalysts for the commercialization, gentrification, and touristification of Tirana’s historic city center (and beyond). Architecture scholar Dorina Pllumbi, who has analyzed these structures, argues that the commodification of national heritage is, in this case, part of a wider nation‑branding effort aimed at promoting the country on the international stage.(Dorina Pllumbi, “Urban Façades, Political Shades: Tirana’s Nationalistic Turn in Architecture and its Subtexts”, Art Studies, no. 22 (2023), pp. 53-109: https://albanica.al/studime_arti/article/view/5808/7570.)[1] The involvement of international “starchitects” is crucial in this case, because it integrates nationalist tropes and symbols within a “universal” architectural language adept at circulation in the global market. The flip side of this new (st)architecture—and practically contemporaneous with it—are the migrant processing (read: detention) centers that Meloni’s Italy has built in the northern Albanian towns of Shëngjin and Gjadër—far from Tirana’s city center. Operating under Italian jurisdiction, they are part of a contentious (read: illegal) deal to relocate migrant processing outside of EU borders. These pioneering extraterritorial structures—other European states have already expressed interest in following Italy’s example—are also part of a “universal” architectural language, though not one of consumption and expenditure, but rather of oppression and suffering.(Maurizio Albahari, Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).)

Denisa Tomková (Slovakia): In the current climate of nationalism and populism in Slovakia, the government is defending traditional values and national identity, while art, critical thought, literature, academic lectures, and museum exhibitions are perceived as threats that must be controlled by those in power.(The author would like to thank Jana Kapelová and Kvet Nguyễn, for their advice and examples from the cultural scene in Slovakia, which influenced the writing of this article.) At the same time, conservative politicians are spreading discriminatory, homophobic, and xenophobic narratives and proposing new policies with little or no public debate or consultation with experts. In this atmosphere of the glorification of national history and the enforced idea of a triumphant national body, art and culture have become both targets and tools in the hands of politicians. This is evident in the government’s control over discourse and cultural production; the dismissal of gallery, museum, and theatre directors; the cancellation of funding for cultural events; the dysfunction of the Fund for the Support of the Arts (FPU); and the unprofessional management of cultural organizations by newly appointed directors. For consolidation purposes, the current government has also abolished certain public holidays, including November 17—the Day of the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy, commemorating the peaceful end of communist rule in 1989, known as the Velvet Revolution. This selective approach to remembering the past is a worrying trend. Despite the cancellation of Freedom and Democracy Day, opposition parties and civic organizations across Slovakia facilitated several commemorative events and demonstrations on November 17. Many schools and universities were given time off by their principals or organized discussions on topics related to democracy, thereby demonstrating the strength of civil society and the level of dissatisfaction with the current government’s influence on collective memory. The Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic has also announced a plan to establish a Museum of National Revival within the Slovak National Museum, following the minister’s recent trip to Italy. On October 14, 2025, the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic also organized a scientific conference on the relations between Italy and Slovakia during the Risorgimento. The conference presented papers dealing with the Slovak national movement and its connections to the Italian national movement and to other European national movements.

Tihomir Topuzovski (North Macedonia): I use the term “aesthetic-political regime” (a concept that builds on Rancière’s theory) to refer to this contextual space in which aesthetic manifestations are embedded in politics, or more precisely, where they give concrete shape to a political regime’s principles through a series of architectonic buildings, structures, and monuments in public spaces, sponsored by governments and local authorities. The constitution of an aesthetic-political regime in North Macedonia is here understood as the result of two conjoint transitions: a national (geo)-political transition and a local planning and architectural remodeling embedded within a new social and political agenda.

In this formulation, aesthetics, or more precisely aesthetics as a technique for spatial occupation, becomes a means of power and domination. In this sense, aesthetics is politically instrumentalized, as it takes many forms and versions, and is enacted in different ways. This distinction is important because it defines how organized forms, meanings, and the top-down colonization of spaces by power elites to a certain extent disregard the will of the people. The relation between aesthetics and power is worth examining in some detail since it can provide important insights, especially in the context of the expression of power in politically authoritarian regimes.

Question 2

Octavian Esanu: Right-wing populism is often understood as a reaction against liberal political culture—where “liberal” refers broadly to the historical tradition shaped by Enlightenment thought and social revolutions advocating secularism, universal rights, and representative government. Are there specific aesthetic tendencies, artistic forms, or cultural policies that characterize current national populist governments?

Folklore in Support of the Arts, Slovakia. Photo by Andrea Kalinová.

DT (Slovakia): In one of her first public statements, the current Minister of Culture, Martina Šimkovičová, asserted that “The culture of the Slovak people should be Slovak—and nothing else.”(Martina Šimkovičová, “Kultúra slovenského ľudu má byť slovenská a žiadna iná,” DenníkN, November 6, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIi_SHs8dAc.) Šimkovičová frequently wears traditional attire and attends folklore festivals. In Slovakia, rural folklore has played a key role in enabling Slovak politicians to convey nationalist and populist messages. This trend is both recent and historical; beginning in the nineteenth century, folklore was crucial to strengthening national consciousness and nation-building.(Oľga Danglová, “Popular Traditions, Folklore and Politics,” Human Affairs 19, 329–340, 2009.) However, despite Šimkovičová’s public presentation of Slovak folklore as the true and only expression of national culture, even professionals involved in traditional folk culture distrust her political views. At the opening of the 70th Annual Východná Folklore Festival in July 2025, the Minister of Culture was booed by the audience while one of the organizers sang, “I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid of the Lord.”(Nina Janešíková, “Šimkovičovú vo Východnej opakovane vypískali. ‘Nebojím sa pána,’ spievali jej folkloristi (+ video),” DennikN, July 3, 2025, https://dennikn.sk/4729246/simkovicovu-vo-vychodnej-opakovane-vypiskali-nebojim-sa-pana-spievali-jej-folkloristi-video/. ) Other folklorists in the audience spontaneously joined in.

The Great Cultural Mobilization, Protests by the non-partisan civic platform Open Culture! Photo by Andrea Kalinová.

In May 2025, the non-partisan civic platform Open Culture! (established in response to what it identified as the Ministry of Culture’s current mismanagement) published an open letter entitled “The opinion of people involved in traditional folk culture.”(“Folklór na podporu umenia,” Otvorená Kultúra, May 7, 2025, https://platformaok.sk/folklor-na-podporu-umenia.) It stated: “We don’t need to see the Minister of Culture at festivals wearing pseudo-traditional costumes. We don’t want folklore to take precedence over other areas, nor do we want it to be misused for political purposes.” The letter continued: “We need expertise, as well as a democratic and predictable environment. We need the ministry and its nominees to create, support, and develop such an environment through their decisions.” This response demonstrates both resistance and strong opposition within the cultural community to growing nationalist populism and the political instrumentalization of traditional folk culture in Slovakia.

In terms of the current minister’s preferred aesthetic tendencies, it is interesting to look at the international exhibition Arte Castell Bratislava, organised by the Ministry of Culture at Bratislava Castle in 2024. Among the exhibitors were Jana Vaľová (a member of the National Council of the Slovak Republic for the Smer–SD party, led by the current populist prime minister Robert Fico), Romana Tabáková (a former employee of the Ministry of Tourism and Sports of the Slovak Republic), and Martina Šimkovičová herself. The exhibition included landscapes, female nudes, and self-portraits, with portraits of the Minister of Culture.(Jana Močková, “Fico otváral výstavu s obrazmi ministerky Šimkovičovej: Každý Mozart má svojho Salieriho, hovoril premiér,” DenníkN, November 30, 2024, https://dennikn.sk/4335815/fico-otvaral-vystavu-s-obrazmi-ministerky-simkovicovej-kazdy-mozart-ma-svojho-salieriho-hovoril-premier/.) The minister presented several of her own works, including the painting The Color Blue and the Magic, which amateurishly imitates an impressionist style. This exhibition is an example of political populism, presenting a culture aligned with the ministry, which has already censored the country’s cultural scene. The message is that art should be pleasant and non-confrontational, and that anyone can be an artist as long as they are close to the current political elite. The ministry has a problem with the overly theoretical and academic nature of high art and dismisses the artistic “elite” (a term it uses to describe the artistic community).

Prime Minister of Slovakia Robert Fico arrives at the opening of the Arte Castell exhibition, held under the patronage of Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová, whose self-portraits were also on display. Photographs by Jana Močková, Denník N. Used with permission.

This strategy could be seen as challenging the concept of “professionalism” in art, superficially resembling the approach of feminist thinkers who have addressed the material requirements, as well as the social, economic and educational opportunities, of artistic creation. As early as the 1970s, in the context of the female nude, the art historian Linda Nochlin argued that it is important to highlight the cultural and ideological limitations that determine who can and who cannot be a “professional” in art.(Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” [1971], ARTnews, 2015, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists-4201/.) These limitations reveal prejudices and shortcomings in dominant approaches to art. However, Slovak nationalist populist politicians are not widening the “canon” or opening access to art for more underprivileged artists; rather, they are asserting that only those within their circle can produce art. This logic has precedents in earlier authoritarian cultural regimes. In National Socialist ideology, Hitler’s taste was a matter of race: the establishment of the eternal value of art could be achieved only by stabilizing the racial inheritance that would guarantee the correct reaction of the future spectator’s body to art. In contrast, Socialist Realist art was intended to educate, inspire, and influence the masses.(Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 138.) The art of Slovak nationalist populism promotes an art for the masses that imitates aspects of collective historical consciousness and simplifies the image of the Slovak collective (white) “body,” with which society is expected to identify.

Monument to Philip II of Macedon (Filip II), 2012. Sculpture Group Olympias, renamed as Monument to Macedonian Mothers. Dedicated to Olympias—wife of Philip II of Macedon, mother of Alexander the Great. Author: Valentina Stevanovska. Photograph courtesy of Sašo Stanojković.

SM (North Macedonia): The modern conception of the nation-state was severely critiqued by Étienne Balibar, who addressed the uncertain foundations of the historical realities of national identity.(Étienne Balibar, The Nation Form: History and Ideology, trans. Immanuel Wallerstein and Chris Turner, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 13, no. 3 (1990): 329–361.) He contended that it is impossible to pinpoint the beginning of a nation or to argue that the people inhabiting a nation-state are descendants of the entity that preceded it. Most importantly, according to him, no nation-state has an ethnic base.(Balibar, The Nation Form, 331, 351.) Multiple national populist strategies are used to fabricate such a unified base, and this is where art—due to its power to rapidly produce a symbolic frame—becomes a necessary and often complicit ally.

Within theoretical discourse from ex-Yugoslavia, I find the psychoanalytic concept of “overidentification” particularly sinister. This complex concept, first introduced by Slavoj Žižek in his analysis of the NSK collective and the band Laibach, proved highly consequential and problematic because of its intertwining of art and national populism in ex-Yugoslavia.(Slavoj Žižek, “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists?,” M’ARS (Moderna galerija, Ljubljana), vol. 5, nos. 3–4 (1993): 3–4.) Žižek’s naïve assumption was that ironic social interventions and self-identifications with state insignia (e.g., maps, flags, symbols, uniforms) would frighten the state to such an extent that it would respond by intensifying its authoritarian power. As it later turned out, this interpretation of overidentification was appropriated as a double-edged and ambiguous excuse for performative social interventions by artists and art groups flirting with populist movements. It functioned as a kind of free pass, allowing artists to appropriate the visual language favored by the nation-state to remain within its orbit, while simultaneously engaging with complex theoretical, philosophical, and psychoanalytic concepts.

Statue of Vasil Hristov Chekalarov (also spelled Vasil Tcakalarov) (1874–1913), 2013. Authors: Darko and Jelena Dukovski. Photograph courtesy of Sašo Stanojković.

In the cultural and art field, there has been no more obvious nationalist populist project than Skopje 2014 (2010–2016).(See Suzana Milevska, “Ágalma: The ‘Objet Petit a,’ Alexander the Great, and Other Excesses of Skopje 2014,” e-flux journal no. 57 (September 2014); https://www.e-flux.com/search?a[]=Suzana%20Milevska, and other related publications such as: Suzana Milevska, “Two Master Plans: The Internalisation of Macrohistory and the Right to Microhistories,” in Skopje Walkie-Talkie, ed. by Damjan Kokalevski and Susanne Hefti (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2019), 17–33; Suzana Milevska, “Shameful Objects, Apologizing Subjects: The False Memory Syndrome and Ultranationalism in the Politics of Representation in Macedonia,” in Museums, Transculturality, and the Nation-State, ed. by Susanne Leeb and Nina Samuel ([Bielefeld: transcript Verlag], 2020), 159–187.) Over the years of its official development, several hundred oversized figurative monuments, sculptures, and administrative buildings appeared in the public spaces of Skopje—the capital of North Macedonia—and several other cities.(The Government of North Macedonia financed Skopje 2014 with public funds. Initial estimates placed costs at 200 million euros, though unofficial figures range from approximately 570 million euros (BIRN) to 700 million euros (opposition sources).) These kitschy yet overpriced monuments and memorials represent figures and events from the remote national past (some relevant, some marginal). They appeal to national pride and promote unity and solidarity based on Macedonian national identity, a logic typical of local right-wing political parties, particularly the ruling VMRO party.(VMRO, in coalition with the Left and the Albanian Vredi, returned to power in 2024 after losing the 2016 elections partly due to the backlash against Skopje 2014.) Importantly, Skopje 2014 includes almost no monuments dedicated to heroes from other ethnicities or to women; the Macedonian male hero figure is at its core. The biggest irony is that the Skopje 2014 project could not have happened without the artists’ contributions and support.

Skopje 2014. Triumphal Arch (2011) and the monument Warrior on a Horse (2010). Author Valentina Stevanovska. The anti-governmental protests in 2016 were dubbed the Colourful Revolution because they included included “participatory institutional critique” such as graffiti “Ružna vi e portata” (“Your Arch Is Ugly”) and “paintballing” of the Skopje 2014 monuments, Skopje, 1 May 2016. Photograph courtesy: Sašo Stanojković.

Skopje 2014. Triumphal Arch (2011). Author Valentina Stevanovska. Photograph courtesy: Sašo Stanojković.

TT (North Macedonia): Building on what was articulated above, I would like to add a few clarifications regarding spatial practices such as those exemplified by the Skopje 2014 project. The monumental complex perfectly embodies the conservative aesthetics and politics of the Western Balkans, which have been marked by ongoing processes of transition. As a result, the countries of the Western Balkans have remained hybrid regimes or unconsolidated democracies. The Skopje 2014 monuments express the logic of an unconsolidated democracy in which state power is stabilized not through participatory institutions, but through the monumental occupation of public space and the normalization of non‑democratic planning practices. Under the conditions of hybrid societies, political regimes have used the cultural domain to gatekeep their view of history, not only through symbolic narratives but also through the material organization of public space. This line of reasoning holds that political authorities seek to consolidate new narratives through monumental forms. As a result, figurative imagery drawing on historical architectural vocabularies tends to be concentrated in capital cities, where statues, memorials, museums, ceremonial avenues, public squares, and decorative buildings collectively stage curated versions of national history and enable their repeated public enactment. In the context of the broader transitional restructuring, a strong relationship between the reframing of public spaces and the hegemonic authoritarian narrative of hybrid regimes is evident in Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia.

KN (Hungary): In my view, the origins of right-wing populism do not lie solely in a countermovement against liberalism. Instead, I would suggest approaching liberalism as the ideology of capitalist globalization beginning in the nineteenth century—or, according to other accounts, even earlier. In this sense, while the anti-liberalism of right-wing populism is apparent, it represents more than an ideological clash: rather, it is rooted in an aversion to a certain form of capitalism. This form of liberalism had two features that shape contemporary national populist cultural production: (1) it served as the hegemonic ideology that masked and normalized the expansion of capitalist social relations (for example, by defining the core region’s wealth as resulting from civilizational superiority rather than exploitation); and (2) in the semi-peripheries of capitalism, the tension between capitalism’s reality and liberalism’s ideology was especially apparent, and liberalism remained an attractive ideology primarily for those who were also materially profiting from Western integration.

Tamás Urbán, Imre Makovecz in front of the House of Culture and Library (A Művelődés Háza és Könyvtára), Sárospatak, 1989. Photograph. Makovecz, the architect of the building, appears in a deliberately vernacular, rural idiom before one of his organic‑architectural works, whose forms draw on Hungarian folk traditions and symbolic archetypes. Eötvös út 6, Sárospatak, Hungary. Fortepan, image no. 124738. © Fortepan / Urbán Tamás. Creative Commons CC‑BY‑SA 3.0.

I suggest that the rise of contemporary national populist cultural production is rooted in this contradiction, which became evident from the 1970s onward, when the U.S.-organized system of global capitalism entered—and has since continued to experience—a prolonged downturn. This downturn, coinciding with the slow crisis of socialist regimes, produced a broad cohort of artists and intellectuals who were critical of capitalist globalization and turned toward rural regions as a kind of countermovement. This trajectory can be traced through the career of Imre Makovecz, who was the founding president of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, a flagship cultural institution of Orbán’s regime in Hungary, and who serves as a central case study of my book project. He first turned against socialist developmentalism in the late 1970s—when socialism entered its downturn—and after 1989 became a vocal critic of the foreign investment-led capitalist reintegration of Hungary. Makovecz was not alone in such sentiments; rather, he was arguably the most influential figure within a broader trend that became common among artists who were marginalized by the capitalist reintegration of local cultural production: the writers who were never celebrated at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the filmmakers who never made it to Cannes, or the contemporary artists who were never exhibited at Art Basel. Thus, national populist artists were not invented by Viktor Orbán, but had been developing over decades, and their resentments emerged from their marginalization within the globalization of cultural production.

ARMORED (Armando Lulaj, 2019) documents Philippe Parreno’s Marquee Tirana (2015) installed above the entrance to the Center for Openness and Dialogue (COD). Both the marquee and the entrance are covered with protective plates in anticipation of opposition protests. Founded by Edi Rama in 2015, COD is located on the ground floor of the Albanian Prime Minister’s Office. Reproduced with permission.

JG (Albania): The question recalls a remark made by Sejfulla Malëshova—who was a communist activist and politician, as well as a philosopher, poet, and translator—in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. In his programmatic address as Albania’s first postwar minister of culture—he was purged shortly afterward—Malëshova declared that there exist two types of democracies: one that incubates fascism and one that suppresses it. He was specifically referring to the interwar bourgeois democracies of Western Europe—which he saw as belonging firmly in the former camp—in relation (or in opposition) to the new popular democracies of Eastern Europe established in the postwar period—which he saw (overly optimistically, in retrospect) as falling into the second camp. Malëshova thus rejected what appeared to him to be a simplistic opposition between democracy and fascism, and instead asked how certain types of ostensibly democratic systems can create the conditions for fascism to take root and flourish. This largely encapsulates how I tend to approach the relationship between liberalism and right-wing populism: the latter is indeed a reaction against the former, but only insofar as the former creates the necessary conditions for the latter to emerge. As a political ideology, liberalism’s primary function is to maintain the feel-good illusion that the contradictions of capitalism can be resolved internally—that is, without abandoning capitalism—even and especially when those contradictions approach the point of crisis. This tension has been brought into sharp relief since the neoliberal turn at the end of the 1970s and its global spread after 1989. In the case of Eastern Europe, it is well documented that liberal political values played an instrumental role in enabling the installation of a neoliberal capitalist system in the countries of the former socialist bloc—with all the concomitant crises and deepening inequalities engendered by shock therapy, which in the case of Albania led to financial collapse and political and social upheaval in 1997.(Smoki Musaraj, Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2020).) For this reason, I am more interested in the proximity—rather than the opposition—and, especially, in the complicity of liberal political culture with right-wing populism and other forms of neofascism, and in the way this is manifested in artistic forms and cultural policy. Once again, Albania provides an illuminating case study.

A Question (2023). Billboard installation by the Palestinian collective A Question of Funding, produced for the second chapter of the MANIFESTO project, entitled MANIFESTO: Desertion. Commissioned and installed by DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art. Reproduced with permission.

In early January 2026, an article appeared in the cultural section of the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, celebrating the artistic achievements of the Albanian prime minister and the way in which he supposedly fuses art and politics in his everyday practice. The timing could not be more auspicious—or suspicious, depending on one’s point of view—with the Mayor of Tirana and Rama’s would‑be successor already behind bars, while the PM strives to block the arrest of his deputy prime minister, Belinda Balluku, who has been accused of violating public procurement regulations.(Belinda Balluku was dismissed from her position as deputy prime minister (and Minister of Infrastructure) in late February 2026, but she remains an MP for the Socialist Party, and attempts to lift her immunity—which would pave the way for her arrest—have repeatedly been thwarted by the Socialist majority in the Albanian parliament.) This article is part of a long-established PR strategy, whereby Rama’s involvement in contemporary art is used to distract from his more controversial policies and scandals. At the outset of his political career, however, Rama’s proximity to and dealings with the globalized contemporary art world helped set him apart from other political leaders—both in Albania as well as in the Balkans—massively contributing to his rising popularity across Europe and indeed the world in the 2000s.

Thus, while one would not automatically associate globalized contemporary art with populist artistic forms, Rama’s adoption of the artist-politician persona was and remains an essential component of his performative populism. In fact, this populism is what drew so many art world professionals to him in the first place. More precisely, it was the promise that contemporary art could be transformed into a popular political language through simple will—that of the artist-politician. By simply occupying both positions at once, this almost mythical figure appears capable of directly “translating” contemporary art into a political language comprehensible to the masses. These fantasies coalesced around the painting of the façades of Tirana’s socialist-era apartment blocks in 2001, a project that Rama had conceived upon taking over the municipality of Tirana in 2000. In subsequent years—first in 2003, then in 2005, and finally in 2009—several groups of artists became involved in this project, leaving their own mark on Tirana’s urban landscape alongside the signature of the capital’s artist-mayor. The reduction of the fusion of art and politics to the figure of the artist-politician helped shift the focus away from the actual content of both contemporary artistic and political practice while, at the same time, projecting a model of artistic sovereignty onto that of political sovereignty that effectively transformed Tirana—and later Albania—into Edi Rama’s canvas.(Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, “Give Me the Colours…and the Country: Albanian Propaganda in the 21^st  Century”, Art Papers, March/April 2016: https://www.artpapers.org/give-me-the-color-and-the-country/.) These moves helped legitimize a neoliberal model of governance and an increasingly authoritarian style of leadership.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, These Are the Things We Are Fighting For. Façade installation commissioned and produced for the 2003 Tirana Biennial. Photograph by Pleurad Xhafa, 2020. Reproduced with permission.

In retrospect, then, it is quite clear that the photogenic façade project paved the way for the kitschy, nationalistic-themed high-rises dominating Tirana’s skyline today and, more generally, for the destructive urban policies that Rama and his successive governments have aggressively pursued not just in Tirana but across Albania since 2013. These policies are now at the center of unprecedented popular protests that have become known as the “Flamingo Revolution”—a name inspired by one of the many threatened wildlife species that inhabit the Nartë–Pishë Poro protected landscape. The area has become a flashpoint of public opposition following plans by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to build an ultra-luxury resort there, with the full backing of the Albanian government and Rama himself. The project represents not only an economic venture but also a geopolitical calculation for Rama—a means of currying favor with President Trump, who, together with Benjamin Netanyahu, stands at the vanguard of the rising wave of global fascism. In the midst of all this, Rama has already given a talk at the Centre Pompidou,(“Conference June 10, 2026: Autour de la Wrong Gallery par Edi Rama, artiste”, https://www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/en/programme/programmation-associee/autour-de-la-wrong-gallery.) and his work is currently featured in this year’s edition of Art Basel.(Gareth Harris, “Sculpture by Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister, features at Art Basel”, The Art Newspaper, 16 June 2026: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/06/16/sculpture-by-edi-rama-albanias-prime-minister-features-at-art-basel.)

But the neoliberal underpinnings of Rama’s brand of populism—and of Albania’s contemporary art paradigm in general, which has its roots in the financial collapse of 1997—were already visible in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as recent research has highlighted. The fact that art world professionals failed at the time to recognize these signs and to diagnose their political implications reveals the blind spots of the contemporary art system, the significance of which has been laid bare most recently by the genocide in Palestine.

KŁ-D (Poland): These dynamics take a different form in the Polish context. Right-wing populism in Poland does not operate through a coherent aesthetic doctrine so much as through what Jacques Rancière would term a reconfiguration of the “distribution of the sensible”—the system of self-evident facts of perception that determines what is visible, sayable, and thinkable within a given order. Rancière’s concept of the “police” (distinct from law enforcement) designates precisely this partition: the allocation of bodies to places, functions, and modes of being that constitutes the implicit logic of any social arrangement. Polish national populism, rather than producing a style, instead reorganizes this partition—redefining what counts as legitimate art, who may speak with authority, and which forms of visibility are sanctioned within the cultural field.

This reconfiguration operates across three registers.

Institutional aesthetics. State-supported cultural institutions increasingly adopt visual and narrative codes centered on national history, religious symbolism, martyrdom, and heroic resilience. Exhibition formats privilege didactic structures organized around moral binaries: heroes and enemies, loyalty and betrayal, national virtue and external threat. Formal strategies once associated with Socialist Realist legibility—pedagogical clarity, narrative coherence, moral certainty—reappear in altered guise, now articulated through nationalist and Catholic motifs. The emphasis on recognizability and didacticism stands in marked contrast to the ambiguity, reflexivity, and formal experimentation characteristic of post-1989 contemporary art.

Managerial aesthetics. Alongside visible aesthetic tendencies, populism reshapes the field through procedural mechanisms. Institutions internalize grant criteria, evaluation frameworks, and programming expectations defined by ministerial authorities. Direct censorship becomes largely unnecessary; control operates through anticipatory self-discipline. Curators and directors adjust exhibition themes, research agendas, deadlines, and public communication to minimize political risk. “Safe” topics and formally neutral historical narratives gain priority; projects involving gender, sexuality, migration, or contested memory are postponed, reframed, or excluded.

Symbolic condensation: the kneeling painter. The 2022 exhibition of Ignacy Czwartos at Zachęta National Gallery of Art, curated by director Janusz Janowski and Piotr Bernatowicz, crystallized these dynamics in a single figure. The exhibition’s defining slogan—“The painter was kneeling when painting”—clearly articulated the reconfigured distribution of the sensible promoted by populist cultural policy. Art is repositioned as an act of submission to transcendent authority (national, religious, historical) rather than as a site of critical autonomy. The curatorial framing emphasized continuity with Baroque and Sarmatian traditions associated with Poland’s early modern noble culture, religious gravity, and heroic national history, particularly through cycles devoted to the “cursed soldiers” (anti-communist partisans celebrated as national martyrs) rendered via motifs of martyrdom, sacrifice, and eternal vigil.

The critical response—widespread mockery—was absorbed into the logic of polarization: ridicule was reframed as proof of elite contempt for national values. Kneeling became not merely a metaphor for artistic humility, but a performative model of citizenship: obedience, reverence, and sacrifice elevated to aesthetic and civic virtues.

The “aesthetics” of national populism thus operates less as a formal style than as a regime of cultural governance—a police order, in Rancière’s sense—that redistributes the sensible to privilege submission over autonomy, didacticism over ambiguity, and devotion over critique.

CN (Romania): The country does not yet have a populist government. Nevertheless, several tendencies commonly associated with right-wing populist regimes are already discernible. LGBTQ+ minorities, for instance, are increasingly sidelined from public display—not through overt censorship, but through a tacit understanding between segments of the art market and public institutions. Such themes are often framed as revolting, obscene, or marginal, and dismissed as products of an allegedly excessive “woke” culture. In state-run museums, with the notable exceptions of the National Museum of Art of Romania and the National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, critical engagement is often replaced by subjective artistic reflection on highly aestheticized and vaguely formulated “matters of concern”—nature, ecology, if not by outright conservative—and often nostalgic—glances back at the spiritual art of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

Similarly, socially emancipatory art practices and leftist discourses—including those addressing artistic labor or solidarity—are routinely labeled “neo-Marxist” or “Sorosist” and openly repudiated as forms of foreign propaganda. The anti-communist agenda of the 1990s, which indicted the entire communist regime as totalitarian, immoral, and culturally sterile, has been reactivated to support contemporary right-wing populism, thereby further marginalizing notions of cultural emancipation.

Within art universities, institutional pressure operates on two levels. On the one hand, capitalist efficiency and measurable outcomes are increasingly demanded even in the arts and humanities, in the form of concrete social applicability and immediate usefulness. On the other hand, a politics of supposed neutrality excludes critical art theory from academia, where it is often dismissed as obsolete or Marxist. This new configuration favors topics with broader social appeal, foregrounds forms of religious authority, and celebrates aesthetic pleasure or awe. Consequently, disciplines such as medieval iconography have regained prominence. In a populist mindset—which is not exclusively confined to the far right—art is reduced to several roles. It is either relegated to craft (when not strictly subordinated to Orthodox Christian ideology), reduced to an ornamental appendix to business or engineering (viewed as purely aesthetic, decorative, and socially inefficient), or equated with a mass spectacle, favoring high-tech entertainment over conceptual depth.

BK (Czechia): As was already said, local national populism is not characterized by a unified aesthetic, but rather by an “aesthetic of rejection.” It does not promote a specific style; instead, it defines the field of legitimate art negatively—against what is labeled as overly intellectual, experimental, theoretical, progressive, or liberal in general. In the spirit of “divide and conquer,” we find ourselves in a situation where we lack a visible presence of a capable intellectual elite, and as a result, the power of social media is being harnessed—with generalized phrases such as “the subsidized culture of the Prague café scene” or terms that are repeatedly invoked, albeit still with a touch of hyperbole, like “new degenerate art” (in relation to artists such as Petr Válek / VAPE, etc.). Behind the scenes of public events, hidden aggression is on the rise, and aggressors are no longer ashamed of their lack of knowledge or understanding.

A specific issue is the role of state and public institutions, their internal programming, and their management practices, in relation to developments on private platforms, private financing, and ambitions in this sector in general, as well as the debate over the public nature of culture, art, and the media. In this regard, one example among many: between January 2021 and March 2026, the director of the National Gallery in Prague was Alicja Knast, a cultural manager of Polish origin. Her tenure was framed by a twofold escalation of political tension at the end of Andrej Babiš’s first term as prime minister, at the center of which the Ministry of Culture found itself. It must be said that, although it was initially presented as progressive (international scope, professional background, etc.), she soon came into conflict with the local professional scene. The new leadership of the Ministry of Culture, which emerged from the October 2025 elections, proceeded to dismiss her ostensibly on that basis, apparently also treating her as a symbol of the “failed” anti-populist governance of the country by Petr Fiala, the prime minister from the Civic Democratic Party; but in reality, this constituted yet another destabilizing move against the largest and most important art-historical institution in Czechia.

What is thus at stake is a gradual redirection of attention toward safe, non-confrontational forms of cultural representation—a softening of boundaries that, unfortunately, goes hand in hand with an intra-disciplinary withdrawal from critical platforms (such as the almost non-existent art journals, etc.). As elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, this unfolds as a peculiar mix of “pre-”/“post-transition” tendencies, on the one hand, and the typically left-liberal convictions of the younger, or progressive, milieu, on the other. The “framing” of the current state of the debate over the “Masaryk” or “Havel” thesis of the state seems almost staged, while, against this backdrop, a massive systemic destruction is taking place under the guise of a “realistic reassessment.” The question is almost conspiratorial: “Who is behind this?” and “What are their goals?” because the chaos that reigns here has actually been quite successful.

Given the developments in the wider region, the Czech scene is therefore justifiably concerned about rapid changes—and is already prepared to react strongly to them, though without showing enthusiasm or any hint of optimism. The famous “Czech laid-back attitude” [“česká pohoda”] is only skin-deep now.

Octavian Esanu

Octavian Esanu is Associate Professor and Director/Curator of the American University of Beirut (AUB) Art Galleries. He has published and produced exhibitions engaging with modernism and contemporary art across Eastern and Western Europe and the Arab world. His writing addresses the post-socialist transition and the institutionalization of contemporary art in Eastern Europe after 1989, building on questions raised through his practical experience as founding director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Chișinău (Moldova). He has further sought to bridge postcolonial and post-socialist contexts through exhibition practice, aesthetic theory, and art criticism. Esanu is one of the founding editors of the ARTMargins Print Journal.

Suzana Milevska

Dr. Suzana Milevska is a theorist and independent curator based in Skopje, North Macedonia. In her projects, she employs postcolonial critique, feminism, ecofeminism, and institutional critique of representational regimes of hegemonic power and addresses their bearing on arts and visual culture. From 2016 to 2019, Milevska was Principal Investigator of the Horizon 2020 project Transmitting of Contentious Cultural Heritages through the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production (TRACES). Milevska's publications include: Gender Difference in the Balkans (2010); The Renaming Machine: The Book (2010), On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency (2016); and Participatory Art: A Paradigm Shift from Objects to Subjects (2024). In 2012, she won the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory.

Barbora Kundračíková

Barbora Kundračíková is an aesthetician, art historian, university lecturer, and curator. She studied art history, history, and aesthetics at Masaryk University in Brno (2006–2016), completing doctoral research on photography theory. Since 2012, she has worked at the Olomouc Museum of Art—Central European Forum, heading its curatorial department from 2019 to 2024. She was affiliated with the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Photography Research Centre (2018–2020) and has taught at Palacký University since 2021. Her research addresses modern and contemporary European art, technical images, methodology, and aesthetics. She has edited journals, organized international conferences, curated exhibitions, published widely, and is an AICA member.

Karolina Łabowicz-Dymanus

Karolina Łabowicz-Dymanus, PhD, is Head of the 20th and 21st Century Visual Arts Documentation Section at the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. Her research addresses the writing of art history, the global Cold War's cultural dimensions, and the aesthetics of socialist-era and contemporary art. She leads a project on artistic exchange between Poland and socialist Asia (1950s–1980s) and convenes the open research group Art after 1945: New Research, New Methodologies. She is the author of a study of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art in East-Central Europe, co-editor of Cold War, Warm Friendships (Routledge, forthcoming), and a member of IPSA's Visual Politics Committee.

Kristóf Nagy

Kristóf Nagy is a historical anthropologist and sociologist specializing in the cultural politics of contemporary far-right governments. In 2025/2026 he is a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University, developing his monograph Waging Art: The Political Economy of Culture Wars. After leaving Princeton, he will serve as an associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University and a core research fellow at the Central European Research Institute for Art History in Budapest. For seven years, he has edited Fordulat, a journal of left social theory, and he is a member of the Working Group for Public Sociology "Helyzet." Alongside completing his monograph, he is co-editing two volumes: Selling Art under Socialism (with Lynn Rother and Gregor Langfeld) and The Politics and Ideology of Avant-garde in Eastern Europe (with Katja Praznik).

Cristian Nae

Cristian Nae is professor of aesthetics and contemporary art at George Enescu National University of the Arts in Iasi, Romania, where he also leads the Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in the Arts. His research focuses on comparative exhibition histories and critical art practices in Eastern and Central Europe. He was, among others, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UCSB. His texts were published in journals such as Third Text, ARTMargins Print Journal, and included in publications like Curating Socialism (University of Toronto Press, 2026), Globalizing the Avant-Garde (De Gruyter/Brill, 2025), Plural and Multiple Geographies of Modern and Contemporary Art in East-Central Europe (Routledge, 2024), and State Construction and Art in East Central Europe 1918-2018 (Routledge, 2022).

 

Jonida Gashi

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. Gashi is editor-in-chief of the bilingual journal Studime për artin/Art Studies (https://www.ceeol.com/search/journal-detail?id=4446), published annually by the Academy of Sciences of Albania, and one of the founders of DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art (www.debatikcenter.net).

Denisa Tomková

Denisa Tomková is an art theorist and curator. She is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. She holds a PhD in Visual Culture from the University of Aberdeen, UK. In 2023, Tomková (with Kvet Nguyen) curated the first group exhibition of Vietnamese diaspora art in Slovakia, Nhớ: The Space Between One End and the Other, at the Kunsthalle Bratislava. She also worked for the European Roma Institute for Art and Culture (ERIAC) in Berlin. Tomková is a member of the international “Ecologies of Care” group, which focuses on art and cultural production related to care and various interdependencies. She edited the anthology Wandering Concepts/Putujúce koncepty (Kunsthalle Bratislava 2023) and is the author of the monograph Empowering Aesthetics: Contemporary Art from Post-Socialist Central Europe (Bloomsbury Academic 2025).  

Tihomir Topuzovski

Tihomir Topuzovski received his doctoral degree from the University of Birmingham in the UK. He also has two BAs in Philosophy and Art, and an MA in Art. He teaches at the Institute of Social Sciences and the Humanities in Skopje and the Faculty of Fine Arts Skopje, North Macedonia. His research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, politics, environmental sciences and the visual arts.