[artinfo] announcing the book,
East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe
e-Flux
info at mailer.e-flux.com
Sun Oct 8 18:33:14 CEST 2006
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
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