What’s in the Margins? Art and the Periphery: Online Workshop by the New ARTMargins Online Advisory Working Collective
The first workshop organized by the newly founded ARTMargins Online Working Advisory Collective took place on December 6, 2025 and focused on contemporary art practices or curatorial models and their relationship with the margins. Workshop participants analyzed marginality broadly in aesthetic, political, economic, and institutional terms. Avoiding conventional “center/periphery” models, the Worskhop viewed the the margins not simply in geographic terms but as a dynamic and relational concept that may as such refer to social, political, linguistic, textual, or economic peripheries, as well as to modes of self-positioning that challenge hegemonic orders. “Art on the periphery” may refer to art that originates in or that addresses life in socially or economically marginalized communities, or that is made with non-traditional materials, but it can also refer to the margins as a threshold or a limit more akin to the margins of a text to which we add notes or commentary.
Participants: Raino Isto, Zsuzsa László, Jonida Gashi, Timor Topuzovsky, Envera Moro, Inesa Brasiske, Nare Sahakyan, Uladzimir Hramovich, Christianna Bonin, Anna Aliyeva, Nada Prlja, Alisa Lozhkina, Christopher Williams-Wynn, Asel Rashidova, Sven Spieker, Susan Snodgrass.
Panel I: Framing Contemporary Art at the Periphery
Raino Isto, “Title: Goodbye Spring, Hello Autumn: Albanian Visual Art in the 1990s”
Jonida Gashi, “Reconceptualizing Albanian Contemporary Art as a Tool of Neoliberal Consolidation”
Envera Moro, “Repositioning through Language”
Sven Spieker, “Postscripts to Empire”
Christianna Bonin, “Land at the Margin of Encounter”
Panel II: East-Central European Art Margins
Christopher, Williams-Wynn, “Concrete, Information, Nature: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s Unsettling
Ecology”
Tihomir Topuzovsky, “Environmental Margins”
Zsuzsa László, “Margins versus Peripheries – Where Can They Meet?”
Uladzimir Hramovich, “Wounded Flight, Self-Sown Art: Marginality in the Belarusian Context”
Panel III: Experimental Institution Building and Exhibitionary Cultures
Inesa Brasiske, “Ghosts, Black Markets, and Empty Vessels”
Ansel Rashidov, “Zamanbap Art: Museum-Making in the Margins”
Anna Aliyeva, “Revolutionary Experimental Space Group: 20th Anniversary Show at the National Art
Museum of Ukraine”
