ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Tagged: Central and Eastern Europe

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Alina Șerban ·

In and Out of the Box: Leaps in East/East Dialogues Through the Transnational Activities of Constantin Flondor

A short glance at the East/East dialogues within the timeline of Romanian art of the 1970s and 1980s allows us to identify existing (in)formal cross-border exchanges which foregrounded geopolitical alliances and sporadically connected Romanian artists with like-minded spirits. In the artistic context of the 1970s and 1980s, the state institutions were responsible for foreign cultural agreements and the organization of research trips and touring exhibitions, as well as establishing cultural cooperation with other socialist countries. The assumption that traveling within the Bloc was possible without much difficulty does not always hold true since opportunities were mostly accessible to artists and … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Hana Buddeus ·

Photography: The Lingua Franca of Performance Art?

As Michelle Henning points out in her book Photography: The Unfettered Image (2018), “from its inception, photography was a means to set images free, to allow them to go traveling, to transfer, to be projected, translated, fragmented, reconstituted and reversed, to be reimagined and re-embodied.”(Michelle Henning, Photography: The Unfettered Image (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. xi.) How does this perspective contribute to understanding the medium beyond its treatment in art museums, which usually emphasize uniqueness and authorship? How does highlighting the concept of images as “migratory, journeying, wandering and vagabond”(Henning, p. 8.) alter our approach towards … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Zsuzsa László ·

Regional Resonances: In Search of the Transnational in Central East European Art of the 1970s

East European art scenes have long invited mostly negative comparisons with their West European counterparts. During the Cold War era, external perceptions often blurred the many differences between state socialisms and their related cultural fields. For their part, local artists and art historians in the countries of Eastern Europe criticized such homogenizing accounts, pointing instead to the many, and wide-ranging, Western connections of individual artists or artist groups with the West, as well as their distance from so-called official art. Another question was also rarely asked: whether there was any dialogue between artists working in different state-socialist societies of Eastern … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles / Conference

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 by Beáta Hock ·

Globalizing the Avant-Garde

Review of the conference organized by the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) in Lisbon, September 1–3, 2022

Since 2008, the roving biennial conferences of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) have promoted the study of the avant-garde and modernism in Europe in a wide temporal and disciplinary framework, setting leading themes such as “High and Low“ (2010 Poznań), “Utopia” (2014 Helsinki), or “CRiSiS” in 2020. The mission statement and communications of the Network have always stressed the transnational aspects of avant-garde practices and indicated that Europe is to be considered in a global setting. … Read more

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ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by ARTMargins Online Editorial Collective ·

Special Issue: Art and Race in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe

Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue gathers scholars, artists, and critics who examine the relationship between art and race in a region not commonly associated with that issue – Central and Eastern Europe. Most of the investigations presented here are recovery projects, efforts to pay close attention to artistic narratives and works that received little attention in their own time or have been forgotten with the passage of time. These authors ask how contemporary artists have understood racial categories, and how race makes itself visible in artworks and films. The impetus of our special issue was provided by, … Read more

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ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Iva Glisic ·

Central and Eastern European Art: 30 Years After the Fall

Ana Janevski and Roxana Marcoci with Ksenia Nouril (eds.), Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018), 408 pp.

“To give a definition of Eastern Europe is a difficult or almost impossible task” (p. 279). This observation, offered by artist Sanja Iveković in an interview featured within Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe, neatly captures the challenge that the volume sets for itself. Elsewhere within this new addition to the Museum of Modern Art’s series of critical anthologies, curator Raluca Voinea evokes the difficulties … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Amy Bryzgel ·

The Art of Contestation: Performance Art in Slovakia

Andrea Bátorová, The Art of Contestation: Performative Practices in the 1960s and 1970s in Slovakia (Bratislava: Comenius University, 2019), 219pp. 

The Art of Contestation: Performative Practices in the 1960s and 1970s in Slovakia is the long-awaited English-language monograph by Andrea Bátorová, the result of her extensive research and writing on performance art.(Bátorová’s PhD dissertation was published in German as Aktionskunst in der Slowakei in den 1960er Jahren : Aktionen von Alex Mlynkárčik (Berlin, Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2009).) In it, she covers the work of key artists from Slovakia’s performance scene, during the heyday of its activity: … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Patryk P. Tomaszewski ·

From the Eastern Bloc to the Bronx: Early Acquisitions from the Art Collection

From the Eastern Bloc to the Bronx: Early Acquisitions from the Art Collection, Derfner Judaica Museum and the Art Collection at the Hebrew Home, Riverdale, New York (May 5-August 25, 2019)

Writing in 2009, Polish scholar Piotr Piotrowski suggested that we recognize multiple, coexisting art historical canons. Focusing on the postwar period, Piotrowski sketched out a series of interweaving histories, at once looking at the broader picture while also considering the political heterogeneity of specific states within the Soviet-dominated region.(See Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009).… Read more