SMArt Talks: Post-Communist Art in Post-Communist Europe

5. prosince 2023
18:00 – 19:30
Knihovna Hanse Beltinga

Přednáška bude v anglickém jazyce.

Magdalena Radomska Post-Communist Art in Post-Communist Europe

Abstract

The process of transformation has led formerly communist Europe to lose its collective identity in favor of stable and conflicting national identities. This lecture is an attempt to break down the isolation of individual, national art histories, abandoning also the concepts of memory, or nostalgia, which are key from the point of view of Western art history. It is going to demonstrate quite different attitude to the narrative on transition, provoking a theoretical discussion of post-1989 art in formerly communist Europe, the category of post-communism, and the ways in which the category of transformation functions in art. Its effect is the development of new theoretical proposals – one in which the initial and target poles of transformation (understood as totalitarian) are redefined, and their binary relationship is problematised as centered on the narratives dominant in the 1990s in the various Eastern European countries (such as feminism, critical art, performative turn), pointing out an important shortcoming – the failure to place artists' works emerging at the time in the context of transformative processes and changes. The result is an entirely new image of art in post-communist Europe. This picture, too, is diverse, but – without ignoring political and economic nuances – it allows the region's history to be told through contemporary art. Here I have constructed a narrative that will allow contemporary art in post-communist Europe to be included in the global story on an equal footing – taking into account the specifics of the region, without the impression that we are dealing with the province of the West. The lecture will demonstrate a wide range of works that are result of the several years of research in Belgrade, Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest, Kiev, Minsk, Moscow, Prague, Riga, Sarajevo, Tallinn, Tirana, Warsaw, Vilnius, and Zagreb that undermines the well-established narratives on the art from Post-Communist Europe.

Magdalena Radomska is a Post-Marxist art historian and historian of philosophy, Assistant Professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She holds a PhD in art history and has held scholarships at institutions including the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She directed and taught the course Writing Humanities after the Fall of Communism at Central European University (2009), and is the author of The Politics of Movements of Hungarian Neoavantgarde (1966–1980) (2013). Radomska has received several international grants, including the Getty Foundation's Connecting Art Histories, and has led or partnered on multiple Visegrad Grants, including Resonances (2020–) and Long Sixties (2013). Currently, she is conducting research on post-Communist art in Eastern Europe and writing a monograph on Post-Marxism as part of her second PhD. Radomska is a member of Polish and Hungarian AICA, editor at Czas Kultury, board member of Sztuka i Dokumentacja, and founder of the Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research on East-Central European Art.

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