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.
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 (Faculty of Art Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań). 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 avantgarde” (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.
Artworks:
Angelo de Aquino, Through Myself, 1973, Galeria Akumulatory 2, Poznań
Jarosław Kozłowski, Reality, book cover, 1972
Geź a Perneczky, Marxists Cells, 1983 (on the 100th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx)
Website created by Arek Pasożyt
Forum logo designed by Luiza Kempińska