ARTMargins Online

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Tagged: art and politics

Andrzej Wróblewski, Waiting Room I, The Queue Continues, 1956, oil, canvas; 140 × 200 cm, National Museum, Warsaw ⓒ Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / www.andrzejwroblewski.pl

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Magdalena Anna Nowak ·

Suspension in Time: Transatlantic Explorations of “Waiting”

Two paintings with the same title. Both executed in the second half of the 1950s, but on the opposite sides of the Atlantic and within two different ideological systems. They are visually akin—not through overt mimicry, but by a repetition of forms and an atmosphere of claustrophobia. Can a chance juxtaposition of Andrzej Wróblewski’s Waiting Room I, The Queue Continues (Poczekalnia I, Kolejka trwa, 1956) and George Tooker’s Waiting Room (1959) disclose something important or inspiring?

Wróblewski’s painting is one of the most famous works of postwar Polish art and belongs to the collection of the National … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Forum

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 by Octavian Esanu, Suzana Milevska, Barbora Kundračíková, Karolina Łabowicz-Dymanus, Kristóf Nagy, Cristian Nae, Jonida Gashi, Denisa Tomková, Tihomir Topuzovski ·

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 … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Tomáš Pospiszyl  ·

Horizontal Art History and Beyond: Revisiting Peripheral Critical Practices

Agata Jakubowska and Magdalena Radomska, eds., Horizontal Art History and Beyond: Revisiting Peripheral Critical Practices (New York and London: Routledge, 2023), 223 pp.

Piotr Piotrowski (1952–2015) continues to be regarded as one of the most significant figures in the art history of modern and contemporary art in Eastern Europe. Piotrowski’s work has not only influenced his Polish colleagues. His international activities and translations of his texts have ensured that he remains one of the few art historians from Eastern Europe known to experts beyond the borders of the region. His book In the Shadow of Yalta, published in English … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Forum / ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Karolina Majewska-Güde ·

25th Anniversary Reflections: Roundtable “Central and East European Art and Culture, 1945-Present” (ed. Susan Snodgrass), 2001

ARTMargins Online is celebrating 25 years! To mark the occasion, the editors invited past ARTMargins Online authors and other writers from the region to select one article from AMO’s online archive of more than 1000 texts, providing a brief introduction that highlights the chosen item’s continued relevance. ARTMargins Online published its first article on January 15, 1999. Today, the publication is one of the largest online archival resources for contemporary art from East-Central Europe and beyond. Our reflection project celebrates AMO’s 25 years, but it also aims to highlight our unwavering commitment to promoting research, criticism, and artistic projects that … Read more

a drawing showing a pyramidal arrangement of funnels, each draining out of two spouts into progressively wider rows of funnels below

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Olya Balashova, Yuliia Hnat ·

On the Concept of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ukraine: Svitlana Biedarieva in Conversation with Olya Balashova and Yuliia Hnat

For many years, Ukraine has experienced a growing need for a Museum of Contemporary Art that would function as the first state-run collection focused on acquiring and exhibiting the work of contemporary Ukrainian artists. The attempts to create such an institution began in the early 2000s, but thus far have been unsuccessful due to political and sociocultural factors. In 2020, a nonprofit association was created to work in an applied way on the development of theconcept of the museum, with the involvement of key experts in contemporary art and culture. In this interview, art historian and artist Svitlana Biedarieva speaks … Read more

painting

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Tomasz Basiuk ·

Five Contemporary Polish Artists Engaging with Race

This essay showcases the different strategies of representing race and ethnicity deployed by five Polish artists in relatively recent solo shows. The theme of race was central to some of the shows, while it appeared more marginal in others. Representing race turned out to be complicated by the viewing context, including the location and the medium in which the work was exhibited.

There are two major ways that ethnicity and race play a part in Polish history and in present-day Poland. One is the historically strong Jewish presence, which ended with the Shoah. Additionally, after the war ended, mass emigration … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Magdalena Moskalewicz ·

“Communism Never Happened”? Transformations of Art in East-Central Europe since 1989

Andrzej Szczerski, Transformation: Art in East-Central Europe since 1989. Translated by Sabina Potaczek-Jasionowicz (Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2018).

The title of one of the chapters of Andrzej Szczerski’s Transformation: Art in East-Central Europe since 1989 can, curiously, summarize the entire premise of the book. The chapter in question is titled “Communism Never Happened.” This sounds paradoxical, of course. Yet the title is fitting: not because Communism is being ignored in this two-hundred-page-long, ambitious overview of art made after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but because, for all that, it has virtually no impact on the identity of the … Read more