Equal and Poor - A comparative perspective on Art in Communist Europe and the Global South in the long 1970s.

International conference.

As part of the Resonances project, the fourth international conference will be held in Poznan as the second East-Central European Art Forum of the Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research On East-Central European Art. During the event, cooperation between the Center and the Arsenal Gallery in Poznań will be inaugurated in the aspect of substantive supervision of the NET archive, handed over by Jarosław Kozłowski as a deposit to the city of Poznan in 2022. The collection is in the custody of Poznan's Arsenal Gallery and - in accordance with the wishes of its director Prof. Marek Wasilewski and Jarosław Kozłowski - the substantive care of the collection will be provided by the Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research on East-Central European Art.

The Equal and Poor conference will focus on the types of cooperation between artists from Eastern Europe and the Global South in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, which, as Piotr Piotrowski argued in his recent book, was based on a different approach to both art and cooperation. In the case of Eastern Europe, it was informative, according to Piotrowski, but a formative attitude prevailed among Global South artists. The conference will address recent Latin American theoretical approaches, such as Ana Longoni's theory of artistic activism applied to the art of the 1970s and to the East-South exchange networks developed primarily via mail art and experimental poetry practices.

The Equal and Poor will aim at revealing to what extent artistic connections and collaborations were/could be inscribed in the processes of epistemic delinking (desprendrerse), which as argued by Walter Mignolo, questions both the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of the coloniality of power, present in American relations with Europe. The purpose of the conference is to separate the liaisons between them. In this perspective, the East-South connections will be then seen as a type of international cultural relations and co-operations that challenge the modern colonial world order by contributing considerably in the unveiling of the logic of coloniality. The conference will also refer to the concept of “simultaneous avant-garde” (vanguardia simultánea) as introduced by Andrea G. Giunta, to bring to light the inadequacy of the concepts and categories of the Eurocentric or Western-centric discourses on modern art. We welcome comparative and case studies which attempt to re-evaluate the tradition of formal analysis in relation to art works produced in communist Europe and Latin America and will instead provide a narrative of the people's history of art, focused on the material conditions of artistic work.

The conference will address the following topics:

- Collective-based thinking and networking both in and between Eastern Europe and Global South
- The significance of the Marxist and reactionary background of artists' art in the late 1960s and 1970s
- Poverty as a means and a problem in the art of artists from both regions
- Material conditions behind a cooperation of artists in and between the two regions
- Between political engagement and political disaffection: different ways of inscribing the viewer in the works of artists from both regions - from political involvement to contemplation of the autonomy of art
- East-South connections and the coloniality of power: an alternative to transatlantic colonial matrix of power relations
- "a non stop communication" (Deisler). The dialogic aspect of mail art and experimental poetry networks and equality as a paradigm for the creation of art and contacts of different artistic communities
- Different artistic attitudes towards political problems specific to both regions and global policy issues

Confirmed keynotes:
Jarosław Kozłowski (Archiwum Idei)
Walter Mignolo (Duke University)
Caterina Preda (University of Bucharest)

Organised by: East-Central European Art Forum of the Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research On East-Central European Art (Magdalena Radomska), Katarzyna Cytlak (Red Conceptualismos del Sur )
Partners: Archiwum Idei, Galeria Arsenał, Poznań

The conference is the final chapter of a four-part conference series organised in the framework of the project Resonances: Regional and Transregional Cultural Transfer in the Art of the 1970s. Resonances is a long-term research project realized in cooperation with Andrea Euringer Bátorová (Department of Art History, Comenius University, Bratislava); Dávid Fehér, Emese Kürti, Zsuzsa László (Central European Research Institute for Art History-KEMKI, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest); Lujza Kotočová, Pavlína Morganová, Dagmar Svatosova (Academic Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts (VVP AVU), Prague, and Hana Buddeus (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Art History).

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

Please send the abstract of your proposed contribution in English (max. 500 words) and your short bio to piotrpiotrowskicenteramu.edu.pl with the title “Equal and Poor” by 15th of December 2022. We will notify you just before X-mas.