Both in popular imagination and, to some degree, scholarly literature, Eastern Europe under socialist rule has been persistently imagined as a hermetically isolated cultural landscape, having painfully lacked access to cultural goods and flows from beyond its regional borders. This course aims to remove this spell and restore the diverse ways in which East European art scenes were entangled with actors and institutions in a wider world even in Cold War times. In doing so, we will survey exhibitions of Western modern art travelling across the Eastern Bloc, local appropriations of transnationally circulating artistic tendencies as well as cross-border connections built by East European “unofficial cultural ambassadors”, women artists, and politically left-leaning artistic networks.
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Beàta Hock
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Antonija Marija Matanic