Central and Eastern European ART: Beyond Social Utopia

After many attempts to define the geography of contemporary art – especially after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe – it seems increasingly clear that it is impossible to define the geography of art outside the global map of the neoliberal distribution of power. Many theoreticians, curators, art researchers, and producers – especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – politicized the paradoxical situation of being redefined by the post-historical and post-ideological geopolitical signifiers of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Critical geographies of art became the main issue of recent art histories, particularly those which rejected nationalist canons and neoliberal attempts at transitional regionalization. Dealing with the ideology of geopolitical positioning of contemporary art within the art system, all those debates between Former West and Former East – in the meantime – have ended up as global debates between center and periphery. Shifting between local and global priorities of the present, this series of talks focuses on structural and emancipatory ways of belonging, beyond geopolitical zones of discomfort within so-called CEE.