[artinfo] How Eastern Europe got the Idea of Contemporary Art? // Webinar // 2 November

[Kristóf Nagy]

How Eastern Europe got the Idea of Contemporary Art? // Webinar // 2
November
2 November 2022, 17:00-19.00 (CET)
online: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81108690879
facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/503247894670755

How did contemporary art and the postsocialist transition come together?
How did artistic trends relate to the political-economic transformations in
the Eastern Bloc? This webinar aims to answer these questions by placing
Octavian Esanu’s new volume, The postsocialist contemporary, into the
focus. By discussing Esanu’s account of the role of the Soros Centers for
Contemporary Art, which mushroomed in the ex-socialist countries throughout
the 1990s, the webinar offers not only a historical but also a critical
angle to the ideological, economic, and artist transfigurations of
postsocialism. The conversation around the SCCA network, or Sorosart, also
leads to questions regarding the impact of the postsocialist contemporary
on global art, and/or the broader institutionalization of art in the
aftermath of 1989.

This event – organized by the Central European Research Institute for Art
History (KEMKI) of the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest – is part of these
institutions’ ongoing research into the art of the 1980s. The first Soros
Art Center in the region was established in Budapest in the mid-1980s,
which makes Hungary a great place to begin unraveling the local, regional
and global implications of the artistic and ideological transformations in
the last decades of the 20th century.

*PARTICIPANTS IN THE WEBINAR:*

   - Octavian Esanu (American University of Beirut, ARTMargins)
   - Angela Harutyunyan (American University of Beirut, ARTMargins)
   - Sven Spieker (UC Santa Barbara, ARTMargins)
   - Karolina Łabowicz-Dymanus (Polish Academy of Sciences, The Institute
   of Art)
   - Kristóf Nagy (KEMKI)

Octaviann Esanu’s book The postsocialist contemporary: The
institutionalization of artistic practice in Eastern Europe after 1989 came
out <https://academic.oup.com/manchester-scholarship-online/book/42421> with
Manchester University Press in November 2021.