Scars: Reflections on art and society in Central-East Europe in the 1990s

The conference organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art from Zagreb and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka aims to bring together established and early career scholars, independent researchers, curators and theoreticians who in their research and practice deal with different aspects of art and society in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The conference will accompany the exhibition “Nineties: Scars” (opening: May 14, 2020), featuring artworks from twenty Central-East European countries, that deal with social situations and political changes of the 1990s that are still present in personal and collective memories, and/or visible in the social reality and public space.
Since the last decade of the 20th century only recently began receiving more scholarly attention in Croatia, the goal of the exhibition and the conference is to initiate further interest in research of the period, as well as to engage in a dialogue with researchers that deal with the countries that share similar or comparable political histories and cultural backgrounds. We are welcoming presentations based on in-depth (art)historical research, explorations on individual artists and artworks, new theoretical reflections on the well-established topics and issues, as well as to those that try to grasp certain phenomena of the period in a broader geographic, historical or theoretical framework.

We invite submissions to reflect on and discuss subjects like (but not limited to):
- Defining the Region: challenges in defining Central-East Europe as a geographic / cultural / political region; Central-East Europe in the globalized art world; the exoticisation of the region: large-scale international exhibitions of Central-East European Art organized during the 1990s; the role of the international curatorship in the construction of new narratives on the region; art historiography in the region during the 1990s: actors, methodologies, approaches;
- Art and Society: institutional frameworks and new cultural policies; influence of domestic and international funding bodies; reflections on societal changes; re-defining national cultural heritage; interrelationship between the national, international and transnational social and cultural spaces in the new countries; interrelationship between art and political activism;
- New Organizational and Communication Models: self-organization models among artists and cultural workers; the role of the “civil society”; transnational artistic and cultural networks; mobility of artists and curators; emergence of new technologies and its influence on communication models;
- New Artistic and Curatorial Practices and Concepts: the embrace of the public space; participatory art; art in context; new media and internet art; continuities and innovations in curatorial concepts.

All presentation are limited to 20-minutes. To apply, please send an abstract (up to 300 words) and your CV (up to 150 words) to infoinstitute.hr not later than September 15, 2019. The applicants will be notified about the acceptance of their submissions by October 1, 2019.

The conference is free and open to everyone, with no registration fee.
A selection of the papers will be published in an edited volume.
The keynote speakers will be announced by October 1, 2019.

The exhibition and the conference are organized within the frame of Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture.