ARTMargins Online

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Tagged: contemporary art

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Raluca Oancea ·

The Venice Biennial: On Black Seas, Dead Waters, and Ghostly Archives

Art projects built on shock and sexuality, such as those presented by Austria or Denmark, have generated extraordinary buzz in the coverage of the 61st Venice Biennial. These projects do not, in my view, fully engage with what Koyo Kouoh, the late Cameroonian curator trained in Switzerland and known for her decolonial approach, defines as the “minor key.” Rather, a posthumanist perspective that rethinks human and nonhuman relations beyond anthropocentric and Eurocentric frameworks lies closest to Kouoh’s curatorial program, which was informed by references to writers Édouard Glissant and Toni Morrison and structured around metaphors such as “the archipelago,” “the … Read more

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: Special Issue / Featured

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 by Flora Brandl, Andi Soós ·

Special Issue: Next To Each Other: Exercises in Horizontal Art History

This special issue derives from the traveling seminar Linking Art Worlds: American Art and Eastern Europe from the Cold War to the Present, a series of five week-long seminars that took place across Prague, Budapest, Berlin, New York, and Giverny from 2022 to 2024.(The seminar series was funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Getty Foundation.) Organized by Beáta Hock, Tomáš Pospiszyl, and John J. Curley, the seminars united graduate students, junior scholars, and senior researchers, this seminar raised a series of questions about the connections—both tangible moments of influence and more speculative instances of … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Dastan Kozhakhmetov, Sven Spieker ·

Contemporary Art in Central Asia: Sven Spieker in Conversation with Dastan Kozhakhmetov

Sven Spieker: A key theme in Western discussions of contemporary art in Kazakhstan and Central Asia in general is the Soviet legacy. Some of the most recognizable Central Asian artists today were born under Soviet rule. What’s your view of  the complex legacies of the Soviet experience–including its presumed colonial aspects–and on the way these surface, or do not surface, in contemporary art from the region?

Dastan Kozhakhmetov: It’s impossible not to notice the colonial tools, strategies, tactics, and the overall colonial attitude of Soviet power in Central Asia. As a result, the Soviet past became part of … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Ileana Pintilie, Dan Perjovschi ·

Drawing in Freedom: Ileana Pintilie interviews Dan Perjovschi

This interview was prompted by Dan Perjovschi’s first retrospective, which took place, fittingly, in Timișoara, Romania, September 3–October 26, 2025. Fittingly, because it was this city and the Zona, Eastern Europe festival (1993–2002) that defined an important chapter of his story. With a keen interest in the regional context and the historical and artistic qualities that bound us together across Central and Eastern Europe, I launched this performance art festival in 1993 in Timișoara, the city that marked the beginning of our liberation from dictatorship. I chose performance art because there was an urgency to express and because … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Raino Isto ·

Towards New Frameworks for Albanian Art History? Ermir Hoxha’s Socialist Realism in the Albanian Style

Ermir Hoxha, Socialist Realism in the Albanian Style: The Liberalization Period and the Communist Legacy in Contemporary Albanian Art. Tirana: West Print, 2023. 180 pp.

Ermir Hoxha’s Socialist Realism in the Albanian Style suggests an intriguing question: are there productive art historical connections between the so-called “liberalization period” (the late 1960s through 1973) in Albanian art and the ways that contemporary artists have looked back on Albanian Socialist Realism in the decades following the end of state socialism in the country in 1991? Hoxha, a professor at the University of Arts in Tirana, has made an undeniable contribution to … Read more

A large crowd of young people is gathered in and around two open cars in a small-town car park, talking, laughing and smoking. One boy sits on a car roof in a Dortmund football shirt, and the pair seen in Figure 6 are present in matching Nike trainers.

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Nina Follows ·

Living Together, from Berlin to Bitterfeld: GDR and Small-Town Ambivalence and Hope in the Photography of Ute and Werner Mahler

Since the 1970s, Ute Mahler has chronicled the times and lives that have surrounded her, from the late GDR to today’s Germany. Born Ute Schirmer in Berka, rural Thuringia, on October 29, 1949, just weeks after the foundation of the socialist state, she effectively grew up alongside her native East Germany. Between 1969 and 1974 she trained in photography at Leipzig’s Academy of Visual Arts (HGB, the only photography school in East Germany) under Arno Fischer (1927–2011) and formed a professional and romantic partnership with fellow photographer Werner Mahler (b.1950), whom she married shortly afterwards. She has since worked as … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Anna Zett ·

Dispose, discard, discare: Environmental, political and emotional wastelands in the German Democratic Republic

In everyday use, waste refers to a material which is considered dirty, useless, or worthless, and therefore deserves to be dumped, ditched or disappeared. If these words are uncomfortable to read, it’s probably because they are frequently used as a metaphor in the social and political sphere. In English, there are numerous synonyms for trash and our separation from it. We might speak politely of disposal, but the underlying problem remains the same: how to get rid of dirty junk for good? Some crap can be directly composted or recycled, but that applies only to very specific materials in very … Read more

News

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Letters from Albania: The Manifesto Collective on Art, Politics, and Trust: Discussion at the Jackman Humanities Institute

On September 18, the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto will host a discussion panel on the experience of the MANIFESTO of the DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art (D.C.C.A.)—a collective of artists, filmmakers, curators, poets, hacker-activists, and scholars that has reimagined art and collectivity through three multidisciplinary projects held between 2022 and 2025. Join MANIFESTO members—renowned Albanian artist Armando Lulaj and art historian/curator Raino Isto (editor-in-chief of ARTMargins Online)—for an interdisciplinary conversation on how contemporary art can build trust amid neoliberal erosion, digital surveillance, forced migration, and the rise of populism.

Time: Thursday, September 18, 2025 3:00 pm … Read more

News

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“Friendship: Writing Art Histories in Relation”: ARTMargins Workshop at UC Berkeley

“Friendship: Writing Art Histories in Relation”: ARTMargins Workshop at UC Berkeley, November 7, 2025

This ARTMargins Workshop focuses on the notion and practice of “friendship” and related questions about elective affinity and difference in contexts of anti-colonial struggle, decolonization, and ambivalent participation in global circulation. To invoke “friends” in a global art history can be to emphasize the intersubjective dependencies of artists, to trace art worlds of material and immaterial support. It may also identify peer-to-peer connections and practices of mutual aid, as in Cold War histories of friendship societies and artist exchanges between nations—proto-political relations operating outside official state … Read more

Installation view of a video piece

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Darren Jorgensen ·

Art of Peace: Art After War

Art of Peace: Art After War, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, February 1 – June 29, 2025

Arising out of a research project by academic and curator Kit Messham-Muir, the exhibition Art of Peace: Art After War showcases nine artists who respond to their experiences of three former conflicts, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda and Timor-Leste.  Its most heartrending works document the memories of war in the minds and lives of those who have witnessed it.

Among these powerful testimonials, two photographic series by Bernardo Soares stand out, bearing witness to the violence of Indonesia’s twenty-four year occupation … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Christopher Williams-Wynn ·

Exploitation, Past and Present: Negotiating the Afterlives of German Reunification

Sung Tieu, 1992, 2025, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, February 15 – May 4, 2025

“…the question arises as to whether all social models of the modern era are not more or less successful attempts to delegate the horrors of exploitation to a majority in the interests of a minority or to various minorities in the name of a majority…”—Heiner Müller, “Das Liebesleben der Hyänen,” 1993*

Over two floors at the KW Institute in Berlin, Sung Tieu’s exhibition 1992, 2025 offers a precise set of reflections on the legacies of German reunification. Her works, from salvaged commodities to archival … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Aida Bičakčić ·

The Image of Crisis: Cultural and Artistic Circumstances in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1990–2020)

Irfan Hošić, Slika krize. Kulturne i umjetničke prilike u Bosni i Hercegovini (1990-2020) / The Image of Crisis: Cultural and Artistic Circumstances in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1990–2020) (Sarajevo: Buybook, 2024), 215 pp.

The title of Irfan Hošić’s book, The Image of Crisis: Cultural and Artistic Circumstances in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1990–2020), announces a focus on three decades of development for the country’s art and visual culture. The eponymous “image of crisis” emerges starting in the early 1990s and spans the war period (1992–1995), the immediate post-war years, and the ongoing ideological-administrative transition that continues today. Throughout these thirty years, … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Special Issue / News

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ARTMargins Online Celebrates 25 Years!

ARTMargins Online (AMO) published its first article on January 15, 1999, an interview with art critic and theorist Boris Groys by AMO founding editor Sven Spieker. Since then we’ve published nearly a thousand essays, reviews, interviews, podcasts, and critical texts exploring postwar and contemporary art from East Central Europe in a global context. 

Throughout this year, we’ll be reflecting on these 25 years by inviting our authors to delve into the AMO archive to explore perspectives that can illuminate our present, and by organizing conversations involving artists, critics, curators, and researchers from Eastern Europe and beyond to reflect on the … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Alexandra Timonina ·

Avant-Garde Book Revised by Emerging Artists at the 2024 Pavilion of Georgia in Venice

The Pavilion of Georgia at the 2024 Venice Biennial brought together three new commissions by Grigol Nodia, Nika Koplatadze, and the duo of Juliette George and Rodrigue de Ferluc, all placed in dialogue with the story of the long-forgotten German astronomer Ernst Wilhelm Tempel.  On view at the Palazzo Palumbo Fossati in the San Maurizio area, this exhibition of rare daintiness and wit is a collaborative project of these emerging French and Georgian artists that revisits Tempel’s 19th-century drawings alongside 65 Maximiliana ou l’exercice illégal de l’astronomie (65 Maximiliana or the Illegal Practice of Astronomy), a 1964 artist’s book by … Read more

Elena Chemerska in collaboration with Ivana Mirchevska, thresholds of no-body in particular, 2020, installation, sculpture, two channel video, video essay 8’30, sound.

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Jon Blackwood, Elena Chemerska, Ivana Mirchevska ·

Snapshot Dialogue: Jon Blackwood (Aberdeen/Sarajevo/Skopje), Elena Chemerska (Skopje/Berlin), and Ivana Mirchevska (Skopje)

As part of its 25th Anniversary Celebrations, ARTMargins Online hosts a series of short dialogues between critics and curators from Eastern Europe and one or several artists. With these “snapshot” conversations, we want to shed light on the challenging political and economic conditions under which artists and other producers of culture in the region operate today, yet we also aim to highlight the amazing vibrancy, resilience, and resourcefulness of its art scenes.

This conversation between art historian and curator Jon Blackwood, and artists Elena Chemerska and Ivana Mirchevska, focuses firstly on the conditions for making contemporary art in contemporary North … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Boris Kostadinov, Kamen Stoyanov, ARTMargins Online Editorial Collective ·

Snapshot Dialogue: Boris Kostadinov (Berlin) and Kamen Stoyanov (Vienna/Sofia)

As part of its 25th Anniversary Celebrations, ARTMargins Online hosts a series of short dialogues between critics and curators from Eastern Europe and one or several artists. With these “snapshot” conversations, we want to shed light on the challenging political and economic conditions under which artists and other producers of culture in the region operate today, yet we also aim to highlight the amazing vibrancy, resilience, and resourcefulness of its art scenes. We begin the series with a conversation between Berlin-based curator Boris Kostadinov and Kamen Stoyanov (Vienna and Sofia). The conversation was recorded in Vienna on September 13, 2024.… Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Judit Árva ·

Approximating Borders: Artistic Research in Practice

Ádám Albert, Eszter Lázár, Dániel Máté, Edina Nagy (eds.), Approximating Boarders: Artistic Research in Practice (Budapest: Hungarian University of Fine Art, 2023) 223 pp.

The question of knowledge resonates throughout human history. There have been many attempts to define it across philosophy, art, and science, but one cannot find an ultimate agreement upon the meaning of the term. We could cite innumerable perspectives and ideas about knowledge—from Descartes to Adorno in philosophy, to quite rigid and strict rules from natural science—but this would testify only to the diversity of ideas associated with “knowledge.” In the capitalist system, knowledge is a … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Kata Benedek ·

Grafting Solidarities – From the Factories to the Fields

Matter of Art Biennial 2024, Prague, June 14 – September 29, 2024

Six years ago, the Czech section of the Tranzit network launched a new art biennial in Prague titled Matter of Art, currently in its third edition. In contemporary times, nearly every major city hosts biennials to foster local cultural vitality, generate tourism, and enhance the city’s international perception and influence. Each new initiative sparks inquiries into its objectives, content, and audience, at home and globally. This constant self-reflection is especially crucial for biennials in East Central Europe—such as the Biennale Warszawa, Kyiv Biennial, OFF-Biennale Budapest, and Survival … Read more

A tapestry made of wires forms an image reminiscent of a Yugoslav-era print of a worker pumping her fist in the air.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Hella Wiedmer-Newman ·

The Aesthetics of Economic Migration: nGbK’s Gastarbeiter 2.0 Exhibition

Gastarbeiter 2.0: Arbeit means Rad, at nGbK Berlin, April 13 – June 16, 2024

Jelena Fužinato’s mobile structure Builder’s Daughter: Everything is Peachy stands at the entrance to Gastarbeiter 2.0: Arbeit means Rad, an ambitious new exhibition hosted by the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK). Composed from the same gleaming chrome as all of the installations in the exhibition, the piece takes the form of scaffolding holding a landscape painting of the artist’s home in Prijedor (Bosnia and Herzegovina), which was assembled with the help of a group of hired workers. Able to be freely moved around the … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Denisa Tomková ·

Practicing Solidarity in Slovakia: The Story of Kunsthalle Bratislava

Since the beginning of its mandate, the newly elected (2023) Slovak government has been spreading discriminatory, homophobic, and xenophobic narratives, and proposing new policies, usually without any public debate or negotiations with the professional public. The new Minister of Culture is Martina Šimkovičová from the Slovak National Party (SNS), who formerly worked at the private television station Markíza (from which she was fired after her hateful comments against refugees on social media in 2015).(Tomáš Kyseľ, “Z Markízy ju vyhodili, Pellegrini s ňou mal problém a médiám sa už teraz vyhráža. Kto je Martina Šimkovičová,” Aktuality.sk, October 17, 2023, https://www.aktuality.sk/clanok/yc6re50/z-markizy-ju-vyhodili-pellegrini-s-nou-mal-problem-a-mediam-sa-uz-teraz-vyhraza-kto-je-martina-simkovicova/… Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Raino Isto ·

History of Albanian Photography (1865–2000)

Ermir Hoxha, History of Albanian Photography (1865–2000) [Historia e Fotografisë Shqiptare (1865–2000)] (Tirana: Albdesign, 2022), 245 pp.

Ermir Hoxha’s ambitious History of Albanian Photography surveys almost a century and a half of photographic practice in Albania, tracing the ways that foreign photographers pictured subjects in the present-day Albanian territories of Southeastern Europe (beginning in the 19th century) and the development of photographic studios in the Albanian nation-state in the early 20th century. It also chronicles the transformations in photographic paradigms that occurred under state socialism in the country (between 1945 and 1991) and the ways that both documentary … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Artist Profiles / ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans ·

Collaborating with Wind, Water, and Time – Saodat Ismailova

The year 2023 saw two retrospective exhibitions of the work of Saodat Ismailova: Double Horizon at Le Fresnoy-Studio National (February 10 – April 30, 2023), which was the culmination of the artist’s two-year residency at the School of Contemporary Art in Tourcoing, and 18,000 Worlds at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam (January 21 – June 4, 2023), which accompanied the Eye Art & Film Prize the artist received for her work interweaving contemporary art and cinema. A year earlier, the artist left her mark both at the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, and at the documenta fifteen exhibition in … Read more

Interior of a tram with black moths placed on the seats, windows and the roof.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Sjoukje van der Meulen ·

European City in a Cultural Upswing: The Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara

The fifth edition of the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara, Romania, took place this year from May 19 to July 16, 2023. Entitled My Rhino is Not a Myth, about forty per cent of the exhibited works were from the region (with more than half of these from Romania) and the remainder from other regions including Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. The exhibition was staged in historic and contemporary buildings in two urban areas – the city center and the new residential and business district ISHO in north-eastern Timișoara – with eleven venues in total, if one … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by ARTMargins Online Editorial Collective ·

Ilya Kabakov (1933-2023)

One of the most noted 20th-century artists born in the USSR, Ilya Kabakov, died on May 27, 2023. It is no easy task to pay short tribute to a man of his ingenuity, diligence, discipline, and influence. Rather than publishing a standard obituary, ARTMargins Online editors asked some of the artist’s friends and collaborators, as well as critics and curators, to reflect, below, on his life and work from a personal perspective. The resulting collage of responses formally functions not unlike Kabakov’s own Answers of an Experimental Group (1971). This work compelled Boris Groys, one of Kabakov’s earliest commentators, to … Read more

The Canary Archive installation view comprising a large metal cage with TV monitors. The floor is covered with newspaper pages.

ARTMargins Online: Artist Profiles / ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Yulia Tikhomirova ·

The Canary Archives by Chto Delat: Testimony of the Russian ‘Des-Astre’

In March 2022, shortly after Russia had attacked Ukraine, the Chto Delat (What is to be done?) collective produced an artwork entitled Canary Archives in response to the shock of the military escalation.(Chto Delat, “Canary Archives 2022,” http://chtodelat.org/category/b7-art-projects/installations/canary-archives-2022-2/ Accessed January 31, 2023) While work on the project – comprising a four-channel video installation and a newspaper issue – had commenced earlier, the invasion was the catalyst for its statement. The filming and written elements were revised substantially as a consequence of the outbreak of war. Today, more than one year later, the relevance of the work has become … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Raino Isto, Zsuzsa László, Gregory Sholette, Olga Kopenkina, Suzana Milevska, Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremić, Dmitry Vilensky ·

Roundtable on Art and Solidarity

The following roundtable was convened online on November 18, 2022, in conjunction with ARTMargins Online’s current special issue on Art and Solidarity. AMO’s editorial collective invited a panel of East European artists, theorists, and curators (Suzana Milevska, Olga Kopenkina, Dmitry Vilensky, Rena Raedle and Vladan Jeremic) who all have consistently engaged with the dilemmas of defining and practicing artistic solidarity. We asked participants to examine the forms and interpretations of solidarity they find the most effective, why expressions of international solidarity often fail, and what lessons the legacy of socialist internationalism may have for us today.

The online conversation moderated … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Sjoukje van der Meulen ·

“Situated Solidarity”: A New Curatorial Model for the European Nomadic Biennial?

The fourteenth edition of the nomadic European biennial Manifesta took place in Prishtina, Kosovo, from July 22 to October 30, 2022. The biennial included 25 exhibition venues in an urban parcours throughout the city, ranging from (dilapidated) historic monuments and institutions to public squares, abandoned buildings, and unused or unexpected urban spaces. Four of these venues have been declared “major pillars,” namely the Grand Hotel Prishtina, The Center for Narrative Practices (a former library), an abandoned brick factory on the outskirts of the city, and the so-called Green Corridor, an unused train track that has been transformed into a walking … Read more

An artist is painting a black and white mural on the wall

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Biljana Purić ·

Live Solidarity — Art Workers and Feminist Artistic Organizing in the Post-Yugoslav Region

Equating all types of work and workers in his writing, Edvard Kardelj, one of the main ideators of the Yugoslav workers’ self-management system, set the scene for the understanding of the role of artists in Yugoslav society.(Edvard Kardelj, Pravci razvoja političkog sistema socijalističkog samoupravljanja (Beograd: Komunist, 1978), p. 25.) The idea of class solidarity and the equal value of work—regardless of it being intellectual or physical—was embraced, and many initiatives followed this idea, such as the art program at the Ironworks complex in Sisak, in present-day Croatia, where workers assisted artists, and collaborated with them in the creation … Read more

Blue and red distorted forms with black text that reads attention air raid sirens in Berlin

ARTMargins Online: Interviews / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Sasha Razor, Tatiana Kochubinska, Natasha Chychasova, Antonina Stebur, Maxim Tyminko, Anna Chistoserdova, Valentina Kiselyova, Lena Prents ·

“I Refuse to Accept This State of Affairs”: An Interview with the International Coalition of Cultural Workers Against the War in Ukraine

While Russia aggressively wages a major war in Ukraine, how can contemporary art help launch an antiwar movement worldwide? At a time when art workers in the post-Soviet region are more ethnically divided than ever, the International Coalition of Cultural Workers Against the War in Ukraine demonstrates a unique ability to unite around a platform for promoting antiwar and anti-colonial messages. Initially intended as an alternative Belarusian pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, this digital platform quickly evolved to include and showcase antiwar artwork from a broad spectrum of countries including Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Germany, … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by ARTMargins Online Editorial Collective ·

Special Issue: Art and Solidarity

Introduction to the Special Issue 

The articles and interviews contained in this ARTMargins Online Special Issue address a wide range of approaches to artistic solidarity, some motivated explicitly by historical precedents and others by specific conditions of the present. They explore artistic projects, online platforms, curatorial approaches, and activist stances, presenting a diverse array of perspectives on what it can mean to stand with each other, even when we are apart—sharing common strategies and common visions, in search of a common future.

The special issue brings together voices from throughout the artworld to explore the ways artists, cultural workers, and … Read more