Beyond Friendships: International conference on Regional Cultural Transfer in the Art of the ‘70s

Artpool Art Research Center and the Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI) are organizing a conference in May 2022 to investigate the possibility of applying the concept of cultural transfer to the field of transnational art histories of the Central-East European region.

KEMKI, bearing in its name “Central Europe” and comprising of archives of both underground and state-run institutions—which were part of different but overlapping international networks—considers it its responsibility to open a transnational discourse on current and yet to be developed approaches to regional art histories. As a reflection on this extraordinary constellation, the conference will approach cultural transfer as a process transcending the usual official-non-official dichotomies.

With this open call, we are inviting researchers to comment on our proposal and present papers that could contribute to the following questions:

- Can we, and should we step forward from building transnational art histories on influences, comparisons, parallels, networking, and how can we apply the concept of cultural transfer, translation, or hybridity to the field of Central-East European Art of the Cold War era?

- What interplay existed between official friendship, its ideological-political background, and underground networking within the region? What role did cultural diplomacy of friendly countries and the socialist concepts of culture play in the development of self-organized exchanges and vice versa?

- What were the vectors of cultural transfer? Which transnational cultural agents, events, communities, and traveling concepts facilitated regional exchanges, and what changes and effects did they bring about?

Please send the abstract of your proposed contribution in English (max. 500 words) and your short CV to zsofia.kokaiszepmuveszeti.hu by January 20, 2022.
The conference is part of the long-run research project, Resonances: Regional and Transregional Cultural Transfer in the Art of the 1970s realized in cooperation with Andrea Euringer Bátorova (Department of Art History of the Comenius University, Bratislava), Pavlína Morganová, Dagmar Svatosova (Academic Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts (VVP AVU), Prague), Hana Buddeus (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Art History), and Magdalena Radomska (Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research on East-Central Europe at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań).

The proposals will be evaluated by the Resonances research team and applicants will be notified by January 31, 2022.

The project is co-financed by the Governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.