Bodies and Spaces of Resistance: The Untold Social History of and Lessons from Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe
Course Overview
This free 10-week co-led seminar focuses on the social history of contemporary art in the Eastern Bloc and post-socialist Eastern Europe as a history of resistance, with particular emphasis on the contributions of feminist and queer artists. Emerging in the late Stalin era, early contemporary art existed underground and is known for its tactics of resisting the official Soviet regime (often referred to as ‘unofficial art’, Sjeklocha and Mead 1967; Stuart 1977; Groys 2010).
*This course may be applied toward the Consortium’s Certificate in Gender Studies.
Seminar Leaders
Dr. Margarita Kuleva
Visiting Assistant Professor in Russian and Slavic Studies
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
Dr. Margarita Kuleva is a sociologist of culture, artist, and curator, currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU. Her research explores labor inequalities in the art world, with a focus on invisible cultural work. She is also a Senior Curator at TAEX and has collaborated with institutions such as Manifesta Biennale, Garage MoCA, and the Goethe Institute. She holds a PhD in sociology from the Higher School of Economics in collaboration with Bielefeld University. Her dissertation, based on over 70 interviews, compares post-Soviet with British art labor experiences and examines the careers of young cultural workers in post-Soviet cities. Kuleva’s work has been published in Cultural Studies and the European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Dr. Ágnes Szanyi
Independent Scholar
THE NEW SCHOOL
Dr. Agnes Szanyi earned her doctorate in sociology at The New School for Social Research in New York in 2024. Her dissertation investigates the intersection of art and activism and the dilemmas of artists striving to change the largely privately funded New York art world and the larger society. Between 2007 and 2011, she was the project assistant of the Budapest-based tranzit.hu Contemporary Art Initiative. While a doctoral student, she was a research fellow of the Curatorial Design Research Lab at Parsons School of Design. Since 2014, she has been a member of the art collective BFAMFAPhD. In 2010, she co-edited Art Always Has Its Consequences: Artists’ Texts from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia 1947-2009 (Sternberg Press). In 2022, she edited a thematic issue of Mezosfera on art activism. Currently, she works on a book based on her dissertation research.
Syllabus and Readings
Course Schedule
OCT
8
Week 1: Introduction to Сourse Сontent: Art and Politics
- Piotrowski, Piotr, ‘Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde’, in Sasha Bru et al. (eds), Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent (London: De Gruyter, 2009), 49-58. https://monoskop.org/images/9/93/Piotrowski_Piotr_2009_Toward_a_Horizontal_History_of_the_European_Avant-Garde.pdf
Hosted on Zoom
Oct
15
Week 2: Soviet Avant-garde: Grand Inventions, Politics, and Controversial Heritage
- Müller, Pablo, ‘Shaping the Avant-Garde: The Reception of Soviet Constructivism by the American Art Journal October’, in Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Katarzyna Marciniak (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, Oxford Handbooks (2020).
Hosted on Zoom
OCT
22
Week 3: Social History of the Underground
- Zdravomyslova, Elena, ‘The Cafe Saigon Tusovka: One Segment of the Informal Public Sphere of Late Soviet Society.’ Biographical research in Eastern Europe: Altered lives and broken biographies 141 (2003): 80.
- Bátorová, Andrea, Interview with Katalin Cseh and Adam Czirak About the Second Public Sphere in the former Eastern Bloc. ARTMargins Online: Interviews, 2014, https://artmargins.com/interview-with-katalin-cseh-and-adam-czirak-about-the-second-public-sphere-in-the-former-eastern-bloc/
- Forgacs, Eva, ‘Does Democracy Grow under Pressure? Strategies of the Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde Throughout the late 1960s an the 1970s,’ Centropa, 2008 Vol.7 (1)
Hosted on Zoom
OCT
29
Week 4: Women Artists in Socialism
- Baigell, R., Baigell, M, ‘Peeling potatoes, painting pictures: women artists in post-Soviet Russia, Estonia, and Latvia: the first decade’ (Rutgers University Press, 2001)
- Hock, Beata, ‘Women Artists’ Trajectories and Networks within the Hungarian Underground Art Scene and Beyond,’ in Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, Piotr Piotrowski (eds) Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945-1989) (Central European University Press, 2016)
Hosted on Zoom
NOV
5
Week 5: Artists and Agents
- Krasznahorkai, Kata, ‘Heightened Alert: The Underground Art Scene in the Sights of the Secret Police—Surveillance Files as a Resource for Research into Artists’ Activities in the Underground of the 1960s and 1970s,’ in Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, Piotr Piotrowski (eds) Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945-1989) (Central European University Press, 2016)
Hosted on Zoom
NOV
12
Week 6: Center and Periphery – I
- Szanyi, Agnes, ‘Go West! –Re-Internationalization of the Contemporary Art Scene of a former Eastern Bloc Country,’ 2017, Manuscript.
Hosted on Zoom
NOV
19
Week 7: Center and Periphery – II
- Çolak, Erdem, ‘Globalization, Manifesta and the ‘East of the West’ ln Manifesta, Art, Society and Politics: Creating a New Europe through Contemporary Art (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024) Bloomsbury Collections.
Hosted on Zoom
NOV
26
Week 8: Circulation of Queer Ideas During State Socialism, and the Eastern European Queer Art Scene
- Benedek, Kata, ‘Circulation of Queer Ideas in State Socialist Hungarian People’s Republic,’ IKONOTHEKA 32, 2022.
- Muskovics, Gyula, ‘Bodies Coming Out: Open Geometry from the Queer Eye,’ 2024.
Hosted on Zoom
DEC
3
Week 9: Contemporary Art Institutions and Their Governance
- Kuleva, M. I., ‘Turning the Pushkin Museum into a ‘Russian Tate’: Informal creative labour in a transitional cultural economy (the case of privately funded Moscow art centres)’ International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019, 22(2), 281-297.
Hosted on Zoom
DEC
10
Week 10: Art and Resistance
- Kovtiak, Elizabeth, ‘Belarusian Artivism: How and Why Art and Activism Merged in the Belarusian Protests of 2020,’ Mezosfera, 2022. http://mezosfera.org/belarusian-artivism-how-and-why-art-and-activism-merged-in-the-belarusian-protests-of-2020
Hosted on Zoom
Certificates of Satisfactory Completion
Participants who attend 8 out of 10 complete seminar sessions are eligible to receive a Certificate of Satisfactory Completion signed by the Dean of The New School for Social Research.