[artinfo] SocialEast Seminar on Art and Ideology (Manchester Art Gallery 6 October 2006)

[Reuben Fowkes]

SOCIALEAST
Forum on the Art and Visual Culture of Eastern Europe

SEMINAR NO.1 - ART AND IDEOLOGY
Manchester Art Gallery
12-5pm Friday 6 October 2006

The focus of the first SocialEast Seminar will be 
the relationship between art and ideology in the 
context of the recent history of East European 
art. Specific issues that will be addressed 
include: the writing and rewriting of East 
European art history; the role of exhibition 
strategy, museology and curating in the 
reconstruction and reappraisal of the history of 
art in East Central Europe; contemporary artists’ 
projects dealing with the legacy of the art of 
the socialist period from conceptualism to 
socialist realism; and theorising the 
contradictions between national, regional and 
international accounts of East European art.

SPEAKERS

Boris Groys (Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory, Karlsruhe)

Ulrike Goeschen  (Curator Frankfurt)
‘From Socialist Realism to Art in Socialism: The 
reception of Modernism as an instigating force in 
the development of art in the GDR’

Alina Serban (Curator Kunstahalle Fridericianum, Kassel)
‘The lost dimension: The collectivization of 
modernism and the last generation of Romanian 
avant-garde’

Piotr Piotrowski (Professor of Art History at 
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)
‘How to Write a History of Central-East European Art’

ARTIST PRESENTATION: TAMAS ST.AUBY

Tamás St.Auby (Szentjóby) is a Hungarian artist, 
who in the mid-60s made happenings and 
environments, and was involved in both conceptual 
art and fluxus. In 1968 he established IPUT, the 
International Parallel Union Of 
Telecommunications, adopting a confrontational 
approach to the communist authorities, and was 
forced to leave Hungary in the mid-70s. He 
returned to Budapest in 1991 to join the 
newly-founded Intermedia Department of the 
Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 2003 he 
established the ‘Portable Intelligence Increase 
Museum (Pop art, Conceptual art, Actionsm during 
the 60s in Hungary 1956-1976)’, to expose the 
flaws in official accounts of Hungarian art of 
the 1960s and 70s.

The SocialEast research forum considers the art 
and visual culture of Eastern Europe from the end 
of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin 
Wall, through collaborative projects, exhibitions 
and seminars. The project is organised by MIRIAD 
Manchester Metropolitan University in 
collaboration with Pasts Inc. Central European 
University, the Institute of Art History Zagreb 
and other international partners.  For more 
details contact the project organiser Dr. Reuben 
Fowkes by email to r.fowkes at mmu.ac.uk or see the 
project website www.socialeast.org


Dr Reuben Fowkes
Research Fellow MIRIAD
(Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design),