Eastern European Art

Recently, major curatorial efforts have focussed on redrawing the global map of
modernism and delineating alternative histories of art in the twentieth century.  Examples include Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945-1965 (2016-2017), Art in Europe 1945-1968 (2016-2017), and The Other Trans-Atlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s-1970s (2017): three large-scale exhibitions of mid-twentieth century modern art aiming both to unify an appeal to a wide audience with a research-based approach, and to establish a global focus, moving beyond the fixation with the West.
Drawing on the case studies of the presentation of Latin American and  Eastern European art in the aforementioned exhibitions, our aim is to discuss how  current art historical canons are defined and by whom, how a new interest in rethinking the traditionally perceived centres and peripheries is finding expression in the museum landscape, and how newly shaped, ‘alter-modern’ canons are integrated into these processes. While recent curatorial initiatives have stimulated an understanding of the modernist art world that focusses on the fragmentary and ruptured, enabling a re-positioning of ‘peripheral’ art production within the latter, we propose that these initiatives nevertheless contain mechanisms for re-formations of canons, albeit in an all-inclusive global form. Our article will include a revision of the traditionally attributed roles of Latin American and Eastern European art, comparative analysis of the three recently-held exhibitions (2016-2018) and a discussion of models for alter-canonizations.

Even in the countries with a harsh system of state
surveillance, as in today’s Russia or Belarus, there
is still space for individual freedom and for a
rather consistent resistance to power. This space
can be found by considering not only textbook
approaches to political agency of citizens, such
as participation in elections and protest demonstrations,
but also diverse opportunities of other,
more local and less spectacular ways of dissident
dealing with power. The choice of the topic for
our summer school reacts to the recently growing
number of studies dealing with the relationship
between power and people, state system and individual
in the context of political non-freedom.
In order to describe and explore multifaceted,
often non-confrontative practices and patterns
of resistance in the (post)Soviet world from the
late Soviet era to the present, we update and contextualize
the notion of Eigen-Sinn, a term coined
by the German historians Alf Lüdtke and Thomas
Lindenberger at the beginning of the 1990s. „Eigen-
Sinn“ draws on the polysemous meaning of
the German expression, meaning both stubbornness
or obstinacy and one’s own sense or meaning.
The concept allows for an interdisciplinary
approach to the issue of civil resistance in different
contexts and from different perspectives of
sociology, political science as well as cultural and
literary studies.