Celebrating the Postwar Avant-Garde in the Maghreb and Eastern Mediterranean

June 25-26, 2026
Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT)

The third symposium of the Decolonizing the Avant-Garde project focuses on post-1945 avant-garde and non-conformist artistic practices in the Maghreb and Eastern Mediterranean region. Often overlooked, anti- and postcolonial art movements in the Maghreb and Eastern Mediterranean area actively engaged with the artistic avant-garde, particularly in the wake of decolonization and national independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s. The postwar era saw intensified cultural exchanges between artists from the Maghreb and Eastern Mediterranean regions and Europe (both Eastern and Western) as well as North America. The period also witnessed the emergence of new art groups and schools at a local level, developing their own avant-garde and non-conformist artistic practices. Through these layered and often ambivalent dynamics, artists not only engaged with but also contested and redefined the aesthetic and theoretical foundations of the avant-garde, expanding its meanings beyond a Euro-American frame.

This symposium aims to investigate these dynamics by mapping the networks, dialogues and ruptures through which avant-garde practices in the Maghreb and Eastern Mediterranean took shape. How did avant-garde practitioners in these regions navigate the legacies of colonialism and question dominant narratives of Western art? What alternative trajectories of avant-garde practice surfaced in these contexts? How did artists adopt, adapt or resist established avant-garde aesthetics? To what extent did they articulate distinct, locally grounded, and/or transculturally entangled modes of experimentation? And how did they themselves understand and define the concept of the ‘avant-garde’ within their historical and political circumstances? By engaging these questions, the symposium seeks to foreground the Maghreb and Eastern Mediterranean as critical sites in the history of the postwar avant-garde, highlighting their contributions to 20th and 21st-century art beyond traditional Western genealogies.

More information to follow soon. 



Organized by Sascha Bru (University of Leuven), Laryssa Chomiak (CEMAT), Abigael van Alst (University of Zürich) 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.