CALL FOR PAPERS Contested Spheres: Actually Existing Artworlds under Socialism (Budapest, 27-28 May 2016)

CALL FOR PAPERS
Contested Spheres: Actually Existing Artworlds under Socialism

Kassák Múzeum – Petőfi Literary Museum and Translocal Institute, Budapest
27-28 May 2016

Deadline for proposals: 29 February 2016

This conference aims to provide a platform for fresh research into the 
art history of Eastern Europe that brings to light the varied solutions 
that artists and cultural workers found to living and working inside the 
socialist system in the period of the 1960s and 1970s.

While some took the path of direct confrontation with the authorities, 
leading to harassment, imprisonment or exile, and refused in principle 
all collaboration with state-run art institutions, others complied with 
the demands of the Party and freely placed their talents at the service 
of communist ideology, either through conviction or in exchange for 
public commissions, exhibition opportunities and institutional 
positions. There was also a wide band of artists, curators and art 
historians who, like the majority of citizens of ‘actually existing 
Socialism’, devised their own individual strategies for negotiating a 
haphazardly repressive system and actively participated in shaping a 
complex artistic landscape of alternative spaces, transitory gatherings 
and artist-run galleries, as well as semi-independent institutions, 
associations and open air symposia, which all functioned according to 
the unorthodox rules of the socialist art economy. Examining the art 
worlds of mid- to late Socialism not from the top down perspective 
symbolised by the notorious ‘three T’s’ of Hungarian cultural policy, 
which divided artists into the categories of supported, tolerated and 
forbidden, but rather through a bottom up approach that examines the 
variety of possible attitudes adopted by cultural producers to the 
socialist system, ranging from confrontation and withdrawal to 
conformity and compromise, this conference sets out to foster debate 
about the conditions of artistic production during the last decades of 
Socialism and how these affected the individual trajectories, aesthetic 
choices and post-communist legacies of East European artists.

Proposals for conference papers are sought that examine how artists, 
curators or art historians, or even entire art scenes, responded to the 
demands of the socialist system, investigating, for example, prominent 
cases of refusal and resistance, the self-image and social role of 
official artists, as well as instances of disingenuousness, ambiguity 
and doublespeak in the machinations of late Socialist art worlds. Of 
equal relevance are papers that examine the workings of the artistic 
economy under socialism, and the different ways in which artists reacted 
to, suffered under, or turned to their advantage the distinctive 
material and economic environment established by the socialist state.

Speakers are invited to submit abstracts of 250 words, along with a 
short biography (approx. 100 words) to [email protected] by 29 
February 2016.

Papers will be selected by a conference board made up of: Dr. Klara Kemp 
Welch, Courtauld Institute London, Dr. Tomáš Pospiszyl, Academy of Fine 
Arts, Prague, Dr. Maja Fowkes and Dr. Reuben Fowkes, Translocal 
Institute, Budapest and Dr. Emese Kürti, ACB Research Lab, Budapest. 
This conference is organised with the framework of the Kassák Museum’s 
long term research project into the art of the 1960s and 70s.

For more information see: www.translocal.org

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Drs. Maja & Reuben Fowkes
Translocal Institute
Dembinszky utca 10
Budapest 1071
+3617931840
www.translocal.org <http://www.translocal.org>

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