Conference

Theorizing the Geography of East-Central European Art

The inaugural conference will focus on issues raised by Piotrowski in his books. Entitled Theorizing the Geography of East-Central European Art, the conference will address the notion of critical cartography (as introduced by Irit Rogoff) and various theoretical approaches towards it. While in the book In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945- 1989 Piotrowski discussed the possible revision of the artistic geography of what he chose to call Central-Eastern Europe, in his last, unfinished book (Globalizing the Art of Eastern-Central Europe, about to be published in Poland), he changed his methodological approach to discussing art in Eastern Europe in the global perspective. According to the author of In the Shadow of Yalta, the new geography of the region involving the art geography or, what Piotrowski called “horizontal art history” “must encompass not only the metaphysics of the place, but also the entire range of historic factors appearing at the juncture between traditions, definitions of the place situated within local tensions, mythologies, inferiority complexes, political and social structures and, on the other side, cultural trajectories, reception of cultural models, and export and import of artistic and other processes”. In his last book – Globalising the Art of East-Central Europe – Piotrowski proposes a project of comparative studies of “geohistorical margins and marginalized cultures of the East and Global South, the Far North, and every other part of the globe located outside the center-based understanding of culture” (Introduction). It thus proposes a new global research perspective under the slogan “Peripheries of the world, unite!”, but also requires re-thinking the geography of East-Central Europe. This constitutes a starting point for the conference that aims at bringing together scholars who are interested in a discussion on how we place Eastern European art and its histories on the maps of global art histories that are continuously being drawn anew.

 

Organizer:

Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research on East-Central European Art
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Venue:
ZAMEK Cultural Center, New Scene
Św. Marcin Street 80/82, Poznań, Poland