VECTOR – Exhibiting the Former East

Content

Cătălin Gheorghe – Argument

Cristian Nae – The Practice of Art History ‒ Art Exhibitions, Between Cultural Geography and Identity Politics

Zoran Erić – Globalisation and Art Exhibitions

Louisa Avgita – The rewriting of Art History as Art: Mapping the “East”

Svetla Kazalarska – Re-drawing the Art Map of “New Europe”

Raluca Voinea – Geographically Defined Exhibitions. The Balkans, Between Eastern Europe and the New Europe

Jens Kastner – Exciting and New: European identity or the artistic field and the production of a concept of “friend”

Edit András – The Ex-eastern Bloc’s Position in the New Critical Theories and in the Recent Curatorial Practice

Marina Gržinić – Critical Exhibitions as Neo-colonial Strategies: Gender Check and the Politics of Inclusion

Cristian Nae – What’s New on the Eastern Front? Performance Art and the Nostalgia for Cultural Resistance

Milena Tomic – Rearview Mirror: New Art From Central and Eastern Europe

Sándor Hornyik – Alternative Time Travelers – Post-Communism, Figurativeness and Decolonization

Kelly Presutti – Les Promesses du Passé: Shaping Art History via the Exhibition

Description

After 1989, a date conventionally associated with the end of the communist regime and the dissolution of the former Eastern European block, as well as of the former binary oppositions between East and West, art history entered a process of globalization which coincided with a process of cultural and political contestation and a new cartography of power. On the one hand, this process reflected new economical and political exchanges, contested hegemonies, deregulated routes of trade, unstable subjectivities and intensified migration that challenged the dominant representations that construct cultural geography and destabilized boundaries. On the other hand, the cannon of art history underwent a lot of pressure, both from within and from outside.

The present reader gathers critical texts, including theoretically-laden exhibition reviews and short essays that reflected, most often, almost immediately on the importance of exhibitions presenting and framing art from former Eastern Europe after 1989.