Thursday, 29 June 2023
18:00-20:00 CEST
Language: English
The webinar is free and open to non-members. Please register by sending an email to aicainternational.webinar@gmail.com by 28th June.
Adaptation or Reorientation? Transforming the System of Art Institutions in the Eastern and Central European States after 1989
The networks of cultural institutions in Central and Eastern European states differed significantly before 1989, despite the apparent economic and political integrity of the Eastern Bloc. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the strategies of cultural transformation in the countries in question also proved to be vastly different. This AICA roundtable is meant to expose the multiplicity of these strategies while focusing, on the one hand, on adaptations of the infrastructures inherited from the real-socialist era and, on the other hand, on how local orderings of the civil society and the market economy have influenced the status and well-being of art institutions.
When discussing the development of the institutional network in the region, within the last 10-15 years many researchers – such as Katarzyna Jagodzińska or Margaret Tali – have emphasised the social and cultural impact of sizable investments in large urban clusters, which take pride in well-attended and internationally recognizable museums, galleries and contemporary art institutes. During the roundtable, the investments in question will surely receive a fair share of attention. The meeting's primary aim, however, is to illuminate what eludes the accounts of local institutional transformations as symptoms of an ongoing modernisation – namely, the conflicts of values that shape the trajectory of museum development, the anchoring of hallmark institutional initiatives in local aesthetic traditions and social movements, or the multitude of organisational experiments that, due to their local status, escape the attention of international researchers, curators and critics.
– Arkadiusz Półtorak
SPEAKERS
Barbora Kundračíková - AICA CZECH REP.
Barbora Kundračíková is an art historian and curator. She is the head of the modern art collections at the Museum of Art Olomouc - Central European Forum (SEFO). In the past, she was involved in the Central European Art Database project. Since 2021 she has also been an assistant professor at the Department of Art History at Palacký University in Olomouc, where she teaches 20th and 21st century art history and leads a long-term research project dedicated to photo album research. She cooperates with the Research Centre of Photography at the Institute of Art History of the CAS in Prague and works as a freelance curator. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st century European visual art, technical representations, art history methodology and analytical approaches to aesthetics. As a curator, she has developed the projects Fascination with Reality. Hyperrealism in Czech Painting, Post.print. Collection of Modern and Contemporary Prints of the Olomouc Museum of Art, Triennial of Central European Contemporary Art SEFO 2021, Home and Abroadand many others. As an author she has contributed to several publications, including New Realisms: Modern Realist Approaches on the Czechoslovak Scene (1918-1945) and monographs of visual artists (Petr Veselý, Václav Cigler, Zdeněk Trs, Jiří Lindovský, Lenka Falušiová, etc.). She is co-editor of the magazine Umění 3/2022, dedicated to the relationship between photography and science.
Omar Mirza - AICA SLOVAKIA
Omar Mirza is curator and art critic based in Bratislava, Slovakia. He studied art history at the University of Vienna. Since 2006 he has been working at the Nitra Gallery in Nitra, currently he is the curator of the collections of Graphics and Photography and Other Media. As a free-lance curator, he has curated over 50 exhibitions of contemporary art in Slovakia, Czech Republic, Austria and Slovenia, collaborating with institutions such as Kunsthalle Bratislava, New Synagogue Žilina, the Museum of Applied Arts in Prague, Kulturdrogerie Vienna. In 2009 he was the curator of the Slovak section at the Prague Biennale 4. In his curatorial practice, he likes to take everyday phenomena and show them from an unusual and often humorous point of view. In 2017, he was awarded the ASK? Prize for Young Critics of Contemporary Art from the Foundation – Center for Contemporary Art in Bratislava. Since 2021 he has been the vice-president of the Slovak section of AICA. In the years 2011–2012 he was the co-founder and director of Faica Gallery, run by the Slovak section of AICA in Bratislava. In 2013, he was a moderator at the 46th AICA International Congress in Košice and Bratislava. Previously he created, directed and presented two internet shows about art. Since 2014, he hosts talk shows about contemporary arts and culture on the Slovak National Radio. He divides his spare time between his family and drumming in a punk rock band.
Dorota Monkiewicz - AICA POLAND
Dorota Monkiewicz is an art historian, curator and art critic. Her fields of interest include conceptual, feminist and politically engaged art and experimental displays of contemporary art collections. Among others, she curated: In Freiheit / Endlich (At Large / At Last). Polish Art after 1989 (Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany, 2000); Semiotic Landscape (Charim Galerie, Vienna, Austria, 2002); The Wild West. A History of Wrocław’s Avant-Garde (2015–16), shown at Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland, Kunsthalle Košice (Slovak Republic), Kunstmuseum Bochum (Germany), MSU Zagreb (Croatia), and Ludwig Múzeum Budapest (Hungary). The exhibition was accompanied by an extensive catalog edited by Monkiewicz. In 2018 she released another survey exhibition “The Avant-garde and the State” in Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź composed of 700 exhibits from Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Germany, and Hungary. Dorota Monkiewicz was a founding Director of Wrocław Contemporary Museum (2011-2016), and a president of the Polish Section of AICA (2003-2009). From 1990 to 2009 she worked in the National Museum in Warsaw as a Modern and Contemporary Art curator. In 2017 she became a recipient of Jerzy Stajuda Award for Art Criticism.
Zsolt Petrányi - AICA HUNGARY
Zsolt Petrányi is an art historian and curator. When completing his studies he already worked as an assistant at the Hungarian National Gallery. He became curator of contemporary art at Műcsarnok /Kunsthalle Budapest in 1996, focusing on the young, upcoming art of the nineties in Hungary. From 2001 he organized international projects when working as the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Dunaújváros. During this period he was the curator of the controversial show by the group Little Warsaw at the Venice Biennial (The Body of Nefertity, Hungarian Pavilion, 2003). From 2005 to 2011 he was the director of the Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle Budapest, where he focused on large- scale international solo and group exhibitions as own productions of the institution (Luc Tuymans, Michaël Borremans, Thomas Ruff, etc). Since 2011 he has been the head of the Contemporary Collection of the Hungarian National Gallery and has been teaching art management at the International Business School, Budapest. He became the curator of the Hungarian Pavilion again in 2017 with the project Peace on Earth by Gyula Várnai. He rearranged Hungarian National Gallery’s permanent exhibition of post-war art in 2014, and realized an exhibition on state supported socialist modernism, Within Frames, Art in Hungary 1958-1968, in 2017. Recently he has been working on the exhibition Technocool–New Trends in Hungarian Arts of the Nineties, 1989-2001.
MODERATOR
Arkadiusz Półtorak - AICA POLAND
Arkadiusz Półtorak is a cultural studies scholar, art critic and curator based in Kraków; assistant researcher at the Department of Performance Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. President of the Polish Section of the the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Graduate of De Appel Curatorial Programme (2018). Recipient of an individual grant for arts and media theory research funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland (Diamentowy Grant, 2015-2020). Co-founder of the Kraków-based non-for-profit space for contemporary art and music „Elementarz dla mieszkańców miast” (with Leona Jacewska and Martyna Nowicka). He has published in multiple journals, including Czas Kultury, Art History and Criticism or BLOK Magazine, and contributed to art-related monographs and exhibition catalogues including Trouble with Value (ed. Kris Dittel, Eindhoven: Onomatopee 2020) or Kinship in Solitude – Perspectives on Notions of Solidarity (eds. Anna Jehle and Paul Buckermann, Hamburg: adocs 2017). His recent curatorial endeavors include the group shows Out of Joint (Galeria Studio, Warsaw 2021) and While I Kiss the Sky (co-curator Goschka Gawlik; part of curated_by, Vienna 2019) as well as individual exhibitions by Maria Loboda (Elementarz dla mieszkańców miast, Kraków 2020), Jasmina Metwaly (Galeria Arsenał, Białystok 2020) or Jan Moszumański-Kotwica (CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw 2019).
The project is co-financed by AICA International and 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.
