Veranstaltungshinweis: Archeologies of the Communist Avant-Gardes: Ephemerality and Leftist Visual Production in Central and Eastern Europe between the World Wars
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Organized by Adrienn Kácsor (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) and Tobias Ertl (University of Fribourg)
Including the lecture Archaeology and Speculation: Reconstructing Friedl Dicker’s communist art practice by Stefanie Kitzberger (Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, Kunstsammlung und Archive)
This workshop investigates the archives of politically and socially engaged leftist art produced between the World Wars in Central and Eastern Europe, a region broadly understood here as spanning from Weimar Germany to the Soviet Union. Much of this leftist visual production has been long “destroyed-disappeared-lost-never were,” to use the provocative theoretical and methodological framework developed by Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler to study premodern visual and material cultures (Fricke and Kumler, 2022).
In stark contrast to the epistemological absence of premodern art, the 1920s and ‘30s are arguably among the most richly documented and well-studied decades of modernisms and the avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe. And yet, this workshop contends, much of the leftist political art and visual culture produced in the region in the early 20th century falls outside the scope of art histories, art exhibitions, and museum collections. This archival and therefore epistemological obscurity results from a complex web of historical, historiographical, and methodological conditions.
First, communist and other leftist artists in Central and Eastern Europe were often working under conditions of invisibility, either involuntarily due to state censorship and authoritarian politics, or as a conscious strategy to avoid repressions. Second, Central and Eastern European histories of artistic modernisms continue to be shaped by Cold War political fantasies. Continuously obsessed with notions of originality, novelty, and abstract experimentations, avant-garde studies are largely unequipped to analyze aesthetic objects that privileged collective aesthetic forms and easily legible and didactic solidarities in the name of fostering mass politics. Finally, one must grapple with the very absence of objects that could tell us about the aesthetic and political strategies of leftist collective desires from the past.
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.
Program:
Thursday, June 25, 2026
9:30 - 10:00: Welcome by Jan von Brevern (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) and Introduction by Adrienn Kácsor and Tobias Ertl.
10:00 – 11:15 Section 1: The Communist Avant-Garde Between Legality and Illegality
Molly Pucci (Trinity College Dublin): “Visualizing Justice: International Red Aid, Political Prisoners, and the Transatlantic Aesthetics of Solidarity, 1922–1939”
Ivana Hanaček (University of Zadar): “Image, Class, and the Continuities of the Interwar Avant-Gardes: The Case of the Zemlja Artists’ Association”
11:15 – 12:30: Section 2: Radicalizing Information: From Visual Statistics to Workers’ Education
Stefanie Kitzberger (Universität für angewandte Kunst, Wien): Archaeology and Speculation: Reconstructing Friedl Dicker’s communist art practice
Richard Anderson (Edinburgh College of Art): “Statistics and Class Struggle: Exhibiting the Housing Question in Europe, 1931”
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 15:15 Section 3: Marxist Strategies from Central Europe: Theories of De-Commodification and Disappearance
Jana Ndiaye Berankova (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague): “Death to Art!: The Inner Model and the Realm of Freedom in Karel Teige’s The Phenomenology of Art”
Maria Chehonadskih (Queen Mary University of London): “Whose Perspective? Béla Uitz and his Luddites”
15:15 – 15:30: Coffee Break
15:30 – 16:45 Section 4: Precarious Infrastructures: Avant-Garde Networks and Magazines
Merse Szeredi (Kassák Museum, Budapest): Fragile Infrastructures of the Revolution: Communist Avant-Garde Magazines and Proletkult Networks in Vienna
Sniedze Kāle (Art Academy of Latvia, Riga): “Magazine Kreisā Fronte (Left Front; 1928–1930) as the Central Platform for the Latvian Communist Avant-Garde Episode”
16:45 – 18:00 Section 5: Fragile Histories and Practices of Revolutionizing Public Spaces
Kateryna Denysova (Universität Tübingen): “Revolutionary Posters in Ukraine and the Ideas of National Communism in the 1920s”
Maria Silina (Université du Québec à Montréal / Ruhr-Universität Bochum): “Creativity in Socialist Public Spaces in Interwar Russia: From Ephemeral Practices to Visual Legacy”
18:30 – 19:15 Film Screening: Jokinen (2016) by Laura Horelli
19:15 Discussion with the filmmaker followed by a public reception
Friday, June 26, 2026
9:30 – 10:45 Section 6: Conditions of (In)visibility
Kamila Kociałkowska (University of Warwick): “Reading Between the Lines: Invisible Ink and the Chemical Texts of Caucasian Modernism”
Sanja Horvatinčić (Institute of Art History, Zagreb / Durham University) & Lujo Parežanin (independent scholar, Zagreb): “The Printing House That Moved: Materiality and Cultural Production in the Yugoslav People's Liberation Struggle”
10:45–11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 12:45 Section 7: Ephemeral Historiographies: Shifting Histories of the Communist Avant-Gardes
Magdolna Gucsa (KEMKI Central European Research Institute for Art History, Budapest): “(In)visibilities of Communist Visual Production in Post-Socialist Institutions – The Case of Gyula Derkovits’s 1930 Placard”
Nikos Pegioudis (Technical University of Crete, Chania): “Kunstgewerbe and Communism: Rethinking the Roots of the Weimar Leftist Avant-Garde”
Christina Kiaer (Northwestern University, Evanston): “The Ephemeral Researcher of Ephemeral Objects”
12:45: Closing Remarks