Boris Buden: Transition to Nowhere: Art in History After 1989 (2020)

“Today, after Post-Communism has ended in chaos and confusion, we are entitled to ask: was it a condition, or a transition; a rise or a decline; progression, regression or simply a time-lag? Has it ever shaped its own form of social being, a unique mode of economic production, a politics of its own, a culture? Or was it just another interregnum of history, full of morbid symptoms we cannot get rid of?

Most of the essays in this book search for answers to questions in works of art. Not because art possesses a superior knowledge on history, but because the knowledge on history we posses has failed in providing those answers. This is a new experience made possible by both art and history, which, in simultaneously facing their end, have come closer to one another than ever before. It is an experience we might possibly learn from.”

Compiled by Boris Buden and Naomi Hennig
Edited by Paolo Caffoni
Publisher Archive Books, Berlin, 2020
Perspectives series
Open access
ISBN 3943620832, 9783943620832
404 pages
HT pere

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (31 MB)

James Mark, Bogdan C. Iacob, Tobias Rupprecht, Ljubica Spaskovska: 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (2019)

“The collapse of the Berlin Wall has come to represent the entry of an isolated region onto the global stage. On the contrary, this study argues that communist states had in fact long been shapers of an interconnecting world, with ‘1989’ instead marking a choice by local elites about the form that globalisation should take. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 revolutions, this work draws on material from local archives to international institutions to explore the place of Eastern Europe in the emergence, since the 1970s, of a new world order that combined neoliberal economics and liberal democracy with increasingly bordered civilisational, racial and religious identities. An original and wide-ranging history, it explores the importance of the region’s links to the West, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America in this global transformation, reclaiming the era’s other visions such as socialist democracy or authoritarian modernisation which had been lost in triumphalist histories of market liberalism.”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2019
New Approaches to European History series, 59
ISBN 9781108427005, 1108427006
vii+372 pages

Reviews: Árpád von Klimo (H-Diplo, 2020), Tilmann Siebeneichner (German History, 2020), Nick Ostrum (Europe Now, 2020),

Interviews with co-author (James Mark): Ondřej Bělíček (A2larm, CZ, 2019), Ondřej Bělíček (Jacobin, 2020), Ronaldas Galinis (LRT.lt, 2020), Rūta Miškinytė (15min.lt, 2020, LT), Zoltán Ginelli (LeftEast, 2020, Part 2, Part 3).

Book summary (Eurozine, 2019).

Project website
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF

Ana Janevski, Roxana Marcoci, Ksenia Nouril (eds.): Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology (2018)

“The fall of the Berlin Wall and the ripple effects felt over the following years from Bucharest to Prague to Moscow demarcate a significant moment when artists were able to publicly reassess their histories and question the opposition between the former East and the former West. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe takes the pivotal political changes between 1989 and 1991 as its departure point to reflect on the effects that communism’s disintegration across Central and Eastern Europe—including the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics—had on the art practices, criticism, and cultural production of the following decades.

This book presents a selection of the period’s key voices that have introduced recent critical perspectives. Particular attention is given to the research and viewpoints of a new generation of artists, scholars, and curators who have advanced fresh critical perspectives and who are rewriting their own histories. Their examination of artistic practices and systems of cultural production proposes distinct outlooks for acting in the contemporary world while simultaneously rethinking the significance of the socialist legacy on art today.”

Contributors: Branislava Andjelkovic, Edit András, Inke Arns, Marius Babias, Zdenka Badovinac, Ivana Bago, Zbynek Baladrán, Claire Bishop, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Andreas Broeckmann, Boris Buden, Ilya Budraitskis, Ondrej Chrobák, Keti Chukhrov, Kim Conaty, Cosmin Costinas, Eda Cufer, Bojana Cvejic, Ekaterina Degot, Branislav Dimitrijevic, Michelle Elligott, Octavian Esanu, Yevgeniy Fiks, Meghan Forbes, Maja Fowkes, Reuben Fowkes, Boris Groys, Daniel Grún, Marina Gržinic, Vít Havránek, Jon Hendricks, IRWIN (Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik), Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Janevski, David Joselit, Tímea Junghaus, Klara Kemp-Welch, Juliet Kinchin, Zofia Kulik, Andres Kurg, Katalin Ladik, Václav Magid, Eva Majewska, David Maljkovic, Roxana Marcoci, Lina Michelkevice, Aldo Milohnic, Viktor Misiano, Rastko Mocnik, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Deimantas Narkevicius, Ksenia Nouril, Ewa Opalka, Martina Pachmanová, Bojana Pejic, Dan Perjovschi, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Piotr Piotrowski, Bojana Piškur, David Platzker, Paulina Pobocha, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Lýdia Pribišová, Oleksiy Radynski, Karol Radziszewski, Christian Rattemeyer, Cristina Ricupero, Georg Schöllhammer, David Senior, Alina ?erban, Slavs and Tatars, Sven Spieker, Tamas St.Auby, Zuzana Štefková, Jakub Stejskal, Mladen Stilinovic, subREAL, Tomás Svoboda, Ovidiu Ṯichindeleanu, Margarita Tupitsyn, Gediminas Urbonas, Nomeda Urbonas, Jonas Valatkevicius, Jelena Vesic, Dmitry Vilensky, Raluca Voinea, What, How & for Whom (Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Nataša Ilic, and Sabina Sabolovic), Igor Zabel, Artur Zmijewski.

Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018
Primary Documents series
ISBN 9781633450646, 1633450643
408 pages

Reviews: Vesna Vuković (Zivot umjetnosti, 2018), Denisa Tomkova (H-Net, 2019), Milena Tomic (Slavonic and East European Review, 2019), Joanna Mardal (Junctions, 2019), Anežka Bartlová (Art & Antiques, 2019, CZ).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (14 MB, updated on 2022-5-4)