[artinfo] announcing the book, East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe

[e-Flux]

East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe
IRWIN (eds.)

ISBN 1-846380-22-7 (cloth)
ISBN 1-846380-05-7 (paper)
7.9 x 9.75,
500 pp., 192 colour illus.

East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe 
surveys the extraordinary artistic landscape of 
the eastern half of the European continent. It is 
an ambitious attempt to reconstruct some of the 
hidden histories of contemporary art and offers 
compelling discoveries for readers based both 
outside and within these geographic limits. The 
Slovenian artists’ group IRWIN, who initiated the 
concept of East Art Map, has invited artists, 
curators, theorists and critics to record a wide 
range of innovations and radical actions that 
have taken place in the region since 1945. 
Despite its substantial contribution to a new art 
history, this book also remains an artists’ 
project, with a subjective and quixotic appeal in 
addition to its informative contents.

In recent decades, Eastern Europe has undergone 
rapid changes in its political and economic 
dogmas and it is now among the most significant 
areas for the production of contemporary culture. 
East Art Map tells the region’s compelling 
histories in different ways, based on a selection 
of key artworks and artists. For the first time 
over such a broad terrain, the less celebrated 
sector of Europe talks to us on its own terms 
about its past and its future.

Not only does East Art Map serve as a guidebook 
through the visual culture of totalitarian and 
post-totalitarian societies, it is the largest 
contemporary art documentation project ever 
undertaken by the East on the East. ‘Where 
history is not given,’ the editors write, ‘it has 
to be constructed.’ This book is that 
construction.

The IRWIN group consists of five artists: Dusan 
Mandic, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek 
and Borut Vogelnik. The group was founded in 1983 
in Ljubljana and was also co-founder of Neue 
Slowenische Kunst (NSK). Alongside other 
activities, IRWIN have been engaged in a series 
of projects which have actively and concretely 
intervened in social and historical contexts in 
the decade that redefined the status of art in 
Eastern Europe (Kapital, NSK Embassy Moscow, 
Transnacionala, East Art Map). The first three of 
these projects resulted in books edited by Eda 
Cufer, who started to collaborate with IRWIN at 
the beginning of the 1990s. IRWIN is also 
involved in the creation of three art collections 
in Eastern Europe.

Afterall Books are distributed by The MIT Press, 
and can be ordered via the website:
<
http://mitpress.mit.edu/afterall> http://mitpress.mit.edu/afterall

For further information on Afterall please see:
<
http://www.afterall.org/> http://www.afterall.org/

For further information on East Art Map please see:
<
http://www.eastartmap.org> http://www.eastartmap.org