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Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History

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Dismantling the Master Narrative

By editorial, on 8 March 2020

Alina Șerban

The new edition of Confrontations brought us back to the starting question: How to write history on the local ground? This time the question was addressed in the Polish context during an intensive week spend in Warsaw and Lodz, where several proposals were formulated. The opening seminar, hosted by the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, reflected upon some methodological issues concerning the writing of Eastern European art history which opened a series of “debates” surrounding the reading(s) of national histories from a comparative and transnational perspective. This challenging operation appears to be even more demanding to the local art historians since such methodology dismantles the need for a homogeneous master narrative, allowing minor narratives to interfere, to divert and sometimes to completely change our gaze upon well-known stories of the postwar art.The group seminar led by Maja and Reuben Fowkes focused on the problematic: What does it mean to have a comparative art history and how to write it? They proposed to start from an analysis of several statements written by the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski starting with the 90s, all pointing to the necessity of rethinking the framework for considering the historical object and its temporalities. This means to follow actively the interactions and means of transfer, to review the inscribed dichotomies of recent art histories by allowing, in a horizontal manner and spirit, to create new synapses between specific narratives, to enlarge the map by including not just the canonized western positions, but also to introduce other zone of exchanges, other poles, within the Eastern European region and beyond. The re-reading of Piotrowski’s texts reconfirmed some of our current concerns in the field of East European art history, but also unveiled some absences. It was evident when analyzing his arguments that several potentialities lay within, and that several doors opened.

Cold Revolution

By editorial, on 3 March 2020

Tomasz Załuski

Joanna Kordjak, a curator working at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, gave a talk about the project “Cold Revolution. East European Societies in the Face of Socialist Realism” she co-authors and co-organizes with Jérôme Bazin. It features a conference, which took place at the end of January, and an upcoming exhibition scheduled for October 2020. Its main purpose is to present the social transformations of the 1950s – such as industrialization, development of an industrial working class, urbanization and depeasantification, collectivization of agriculture, elimination of old elites, egalitarianism, social mobility and collective ownership of the means of production – through the perspective of a comparative, transnational, entangled history of architecture, visual arts and design in several East European countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania.

This comprehensive project is to cover a wide range of thematic issues: complex chronologies of Socialist Realism, its pre- and post-histories, changing geographies of cultural exchanges during the 1950s (not only ones within the Socialist Bloc, or between the countries of the Bloc and Western Europe, but also between Eastern Europe and extra-European countries), visual celebration of labour and workers, proletarisation of art and design, development of cultural infrastructure and movement of workers as art creators, the heterogeneity of socialist societies – social structure of the peasantry and the working class, internal divisions within both groups and their mutual relations and, last but not least, the question of gender roles and national minorities. The conference and the exhibition clearly aim at making another step in the ongoing process of shifting the historiography of Socialist Realism from the paradigm of political history and questions of aesthetics to a complex interpretative framework of socialist modernizations – and it seems they stand a good chance of succeeding.

Socialist Exhibition Histories

By editorial, on 3 March 2020

Magdalena Ziółkowska

The lecture of Dr. Gabriela Świtek (Head of the Department of Documentation at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art) was dedicated to the history of Central Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions that functioned between 1949–92 as the main central organizer of travelling exhibitions of visual arts and architecture. For more than half of the century CBWA created the apparatus for national and international politics of exhibitions and conferences, promoting various movements and artistic tendencies, organizing individual exhibitions of Polish and international artists.

The research project initiated by Gabriela Świtek, in collaboration with University of Warsaw, aims at founding an online database dedicated to all archival sources of the exhibitions organized at the CBWA and introducing new methodologies in the field of the history of exhibitions’ history. In socialist Poland the “exhibition” was an important medium of cultural exchange between countries of the Bloc and the West, distributing the political vision of state culture, as well as establishing canons that influenced the local artists and critics. The role of this long-term interdisciplinary project is to analyze selected examples of exhibitions in relation to the broader context of the cultural politics, the connections of the pre-war avant-garde tradition and post-war modernism, as well as deconstructing ideological frameworks attached to them.