Repositioning the Postwar
Avant-Garde in the East

June 12-13, 2025
Archiv der Avantgarden - Egidio Marzona (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden)

The second symposium of the ‘Decolonizing the Avant-Garde’ project focuses on post-1945 avant-garde and non-conformist artistic practices in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Japan. The view of the avant-garde that emerged during the Cold War is largely West-centric—attempts to decolonize the post-1945 avant-garde accordingly have tended to focus mainly on its relation to the colonizing and colonialist West. Before and during the Cold War, however, the West was, of course, not the only colonizing and colonialist power. In an attempt to ‘former’ the West (much like the ‘formering' of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall, when many began to refer to the ‘former Eastern Bloc’), this second symposium focuses on avant-garde practitioners across races and ethnicities who worked within Eastern and Central-Eastern Europe—before, behind, and after the fall of the Iron Curtain—as well as within Japan.
 
Two main issues will be tackled: On the one hand, the symposium wishes to chart how avant-garde artists in these regions critically regarded the West, i.e., the acclaimed center of postwar avant-gardism. What (other) notions or theories of the avant-garde were in circulation here? What decentering practices did avant-garde artists develop? Did the avant-garde in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Japan position itself differently than that in the West? On the other hand, the event seeks to question the mainly Western (art-historical) discourse of decolonization itself. Does that discourse and the power-structures it aims to expose do justice, for example, to the complexities of artists holding ties to Soviet colonies outside the West? Did colonial and colonizing practices play a similar or different role in the avant-garde’s history here? And to what extent should the critical apparatus of decolonization be revised accordingly? To answer these questions, the symposium will also pay attention to Japan and to how its colonial past likewise impacted post-1945 avant-garde practices.
 
Invited speakers include:

Zusana Bartošová & Lucia Gregorová-Stach (Institute of Art History, Slovak Academy of Sciences)
Yeon Shim Chung (Hongik University, Seoul)
Jasmina Čubrilo (University of Belgrade)
Ana Ereš (University of Belgrade)
Sabine Hänsgen (independent scholar, Bochum)
Angela Harutyunyan (Berlin University of the Arts)
Radok Ištok (Curator National Gallery Prague)  
Adrienn Kácsor (Bauhaus-University Weimar)
Ketevan S. Kintsurashvili (independent scholar, Tbilisi, Georgia)
Daria Kostina (independent researcher, Almaty, Kazakhstan)
Mira Kozhanova (University of Bamberg)
Shirin Melikova (Azerbaijan National Museum of Art, Baku)
Harsha Ram (University of California, Berkeley)
Maria Redaelli (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
Irina Riznychok (Constructor University, Bremen)
Przemysław Strożek (ADA, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden)
Miško Šuvaković (University of Belgrade)
Simone Wille (University of Innsbruck)
Midori Yoshimoto (New Jersey City University)

A provisional conference program including abstracts and speakers' bios can be consulted here.

Registration is free but mandatory. In person attendance no longer possible, hélas. We're all booked out. If you would like to attend the symposium online instead, please write to Przemysław Strożek (Przemyslaw.Strozek [@] skd.museum) before June 9. 

More information about the conference venue, the Archiv der Avantgarden - Egidio Marzona, can be found here.

Organized by Sascha Bru (University of Leuven), Rudolf Fischer (ADA, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), Przemysław Strożek (ADA, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden) and Isabel Wünsche (Constructor University, Bremen).

© The D-AG Collective. Banner image: Detail from Ana Hatherly, The streets of Lisbon (1977). Collage on paper on hardboard from the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Modern Collection, Lisbon, Portugal. Inv.: 91P742. Photo: Pedro Ribeiro Simões. CC by 2.0 Deed. Source.