Program

The day is structured in three thematic sessions:

• The morning will focus on innovative channels for the cross-border circulation of art across Cold War divides, spanning Europe, North Africa, and Latin America.
• In the afternoon neutral spaces that provided platforms for artistic collaboration based on shared values between artists on opposing sides of the Iron Curtain are discussed.
• The closing session asks how racialised artists in the United States explored the potential of socialist artistic practices in Eastern Europe to inform their quest for rights and recognition at home.

Program (PDF)

There will be interventions by internationally renowned artists: the London-based Slovenian performance, installation, and film artist Jasmina Cibic, and the Moscow-born New York-based conceptual artist Yevgeniy Fiks. Both will present examples of their work and reflect on their personal practices of using archival materials to challenge our understanding of Cold War history, by revealing the links between art and political rhetoric in the Communist and post-Communist contexts. The artists’ collective Slavs and Tatars will close the day with their Lecture Performance “Red-Black Thread.” The performance looks at the experience of labour, race, and sexuality from a shared Eastern European and African-American perspective to better understand failed promises of conviviality and coexistence.

Conference conveners:

Conference conveners: Julia Tatiana Bailey and Kathleen Reinhardt

Participants in the conference: Jérôme Bazin, Jessica Horton, Mary Ikoniadou, Ksenia Nouril, Agnieszka Pindera, Gaelle Prodhon, Maria Anna Rogucka, Sophie Thorak, Christopher Williams-Wynn, and artists Jasmina Cibic, Yevgeniy Fiks, and Slavs and Tatars.

The conference will be held in English.

This conference builds on the Art in Translation/University of Edinburgh anthology project Hot Art, Cold War, and is presented in conversation with the research and exhibition project Revolutionary Romances: Transcultural Art Histories in the GDR at the Albertinum of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. This conference is the first in a series of three that explore alternative Central-East European art histories, with workshops to follow in 2023 at the Institute of Art History and the Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research on East-Central European Art at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, and at MARe/Museum of Recent Art in Bucharest, Romania.

The conference is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
The lecture performance by Slavs and Tatars is made possible through the support of the Goethe-Institut New York.