Calendar of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Thu

Archeologies of the Communist Avant-Gardes: Ephemerality and Leftist Visual Production in Central and Eastern Europe between the World Wars

This two-day international conference brings together scholars to grapple with the very absence of objects that could tell us about the aesthetic and political strategies of leftist collective desires from the past. Much of the politically and socially engaged leftist art produced between the World Wars in Central and Eastern Europe has been long “destroyed-disappeared-lost-never were,” to use the provocative theoretical and methodological framework developed by Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler (2022). While recent studies and exhibitions have brought innovative research methods to studying guerilla art and the art of protest (e.g., Flood and Grindon, Disobedient Objects, 2014; Gleisser, Risk Work, 2023), these most often focus on the period past the 1960s, due to the fact that earlier examples of so-called “disobedient objects” do not exist any longer. The majority of communist visual and artistic practices in Central and Eastern Europe was quintessentially ephemeral or has become so. Therefore studying communist and antifascist propaganda, anonymous leftist printmaking, street and festive decoration and agit-prop objects, monuments, Proletkul’t, worker’s photography and worker-correspondence movements, textile and applied arts, and didactic and scientific filmmaking among other aesthetic forms, calls for new and innovative research methods across disciplines.

Date: Thursday, 25 June 2026, 09.00 am
End: Friday, 26 June 2026, 01.00 pm
Location: Lounge - Seminarraum K01 Steubenstraße 6, Haus G Universitätsbibliothek

Die Konferenz wird von der Professur Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte an der Fakultät Architektur und Urbanistik organisiert und ist für alle offen. Die Konferenz findet auf Englisch statt. Für weitere Informationen kontaktieren Sie bitte Adrienn Kácsor: adrienn.kacsor[at]uni-weimar.de

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