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

The Centre for Modern Art & Theory cordially invites you to the last SMArt Talks lecture of the autumn semester of 2023! Our guest will be Magdalena Radomska, Post-Marxist art historian and historian of philosophy, Assistant Professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. Her talk will undermine the well-established narratives on the art from post-Communist Europe and demonstrate an entirely different attitude to the history of the transition from collective identity to stable and conflicting national identities.

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 problematized 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.