Piotr Piotrowski: In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989 (2005/2009)

“In the Shadow of Yalta is a comprehensive study of the artistic culture of the region between the Iron Curtain and the USSR, taking in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. Piotr Piotrowski chronicles the relationship between art production and politics in this zone between the end of World War II and the fall of Communism, focusing in particular on the avant-garde.

Beginning with an analysis of Surrealism in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, Piotrowski then examines the evolution of Modernism against the backdrop of the decline of Stalinism. He follows with an account of the neo-avant-garde experience: the body art and conceptual art made during the volatile political circumstances of the 1970s, the times of ‘real Socialism’. The book concludes with an epilogue describing the end of the Communist system in East-Central Europe, and the art that served witness to that end. Alongside the portrayal of the frequently challenging art that was made in response to such difficult circumstances, the common threads that emerge from the narrative are the erosion of ideology, the rise of consumerism and the emergence of political pragmatism.

Featuring more than 220 images by artists frequently unfamiliar to an English-speaking audience, In the Shadow of Yalta is a fascinating portrait of the art made in an area and during a time of crucial importance to the development of Europe as we know it today. The book will have much to say to art historians, art critics, and students of art history interested in Central and Eastern European art, as well as general historians of the region.”

First published by Rebis, Poznań, Poland, 2005.

Translated by Anna Brzyski
Publisher Reaktion Books, 2009
ISBN 1861894384, 9781861894380
487 pages

Reviews: Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius (Umění, 2007, repr.), Piotr Bernatowicz (Nordlit, 2007), Dorota Biczel Nelson (2008), Éva Forgács (ARTMargins, 2009, repr.), Magdalena Cześniak-Zielińska (Facta Simonidis, 2009, PL), Henning Küpper (kunsttexte.de Ostblick, 2010, DE), Andrzej Szczerski (Journal of Architecture, 2010), Pál Deréky (Balkon, 2010, HU), David Crowley (J European Studies, 2011).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2019-2-2)

Nora Farik (ed.): 1968 Revisited: 40 Years of Protest Movements (2008)

Essays and Interviews with Protagonists of 1968.

Contents
* Preface by Nora Farik and Claude Weinber
* What is left? 1968 revisited introduction by Ralf Fücks
* 1968 – Again! Reference year for an age. The events in Brazil by Marcelo Ridenti
* Poland in 1968: „The freedom we needed so badly was so obvious elsewhere“ by Teresa Bogucka
* 1968: Czechoslovakia by Oldřich Tůma
* 1968 in Moscow – A Beginning by Alexander Daniel
* 1968 – An East German Perspective by Wolfgang Templin
* Germany 1968 – SDS, Urban Guerillas and Visions of Räterepublik interview with Klaus Meschkat
* Apartheid South Africa in 1968: Not quite business as usual by Bill Nasson
* Belgrade, June 1968 by Nebojša Popov
* May 1968 in Belgium: The crack bursts open by Benoît Lechat
* „Today the big political game is ‘bashing the 1960s’“ interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Publisher Heinrich Böll Foundation EU Regional Office Brussels, May 2008
Democracy series, Volume 7
68 pages

Publisher

PDF (English, updated on 2024-1-18)

Red Thread, 1-6 (2009-) [English/Turkish]

“The project Red Thread is envisioned as an active network and platform for exchange of knowledge and collaboration of artists, curators, social scientists, theorists and cultural operators from the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus, North Africa, and beyond. It aims to create and widely disseminate new knowledge about paradigmatic socially engaged art practices in a wide geopolitical context, thus challenging the predominance of Western narratives in official art histories and exhibition making. Through initiating research, meetings, panel discussions and an active online site for exploring both historical and contemporary approaches that deepen and challenge broader relations of art and society, Red Thread intends to reopen the issues of joint modernist legacies and histories between various so-called “marginal” regions, and attempts to create new approaches to deal with questions of auto-histories, self-positioning and reinterpretation of art history.

The title of the project indicates a critical cultural and artistic engagement that has been present in the peripheral zones of the European modernistic project in different conceptual manifestations since the 1960s, when the crisis of the project of Western monolith high modernism in its relation to ideas of social progress became apparent. Metaphorical meaning of the expression ‘red thread’ suggests not only way out of labyrinth, but also a fragile, elastic link between different intellectual, social and artistic experimentations that share a desire for social change and the active role of culture and art in this process.

Red Thread is conceived as a possibility for starting a long-term communication and establishing new international platforms for artists and cultural workers from the regions considered to be part of supposedly shrinking but still corporeally very real geographical margins. Even if today one feels that there is no region excluded from the international art circuit, there still remains the issue of control, the unresolved and continuing play of inclusion and exclusion. In that respect, focusing primarily on regions of the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus and North Africa, the project is conceived as an active site for rethinking the questions of production, definition, and presentation of the artwork and the artists’ identity in the globalized (art)world. It will explore the rules of conduct established in the Western art system, and question how the circulation and reception of information is regulated and how we can (and can we really) challenge it.”

Red Thread is initiated by WHW (what, how and for whom) and Osman Kavala in 2009 as part of 11th Istanbul Biennial.

Issue 1: HTML, PDF (2009)
Issue 2: “Sweet 60s”: HTML, PDF (2010)
Issue 3: HTML, PDF (2011)
Issue 4: Disposessions, Solidarities, Deintegrations, HTML, PDF (2017)
Issue 5: Alt-Truths and Insta-Realities: The Psychopolitics of Contemporary Right, HTML, PDF (2020)
Issue 6: Remembering in Circles, HTML, PDF (2023, added on 2024-1-18)