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Location: OMRRK C building 1135 Budapest, Szabolcs street 33.

chair: Zsuzsa László

Is the concept of translation of any help in writing the transnational art histories of Central-East Europe. And if so, in what sense? The problem, clearly, lies in the idea of transnationality. What does the prefix "trans" mean in relation to the epistemic regime of national disciplines (for example, "Hungarian historiography", "Slovenian philosophy", "Polish art history") that are based on the integrity of national territory and the unity of a language? If it means merely an accumulation of knowledge in Central-East Europe then we have another problem: how is this larger area formed and unified? To say that this knowledge is of a different character because it is generated by interaction and mutual influences of the art practitioners at both official and underground levels does not solve this problem. What are the origins of the cultural differences that has created the region of Central-East Europe? Insofar as it transcends the paradigm of communication, the concept of translation helps us to focus on what is crucial: the processes of bordering between languages, nations, disciplines, areas and art histories. Translation is more than merely a “transfer” of content. It helps us discover the linguistic, cultural, political, and epistemic heterogeneity beyond "transnational" or "transdisciplinary" areas, and to activate its emancipatory potential.

The received concept of cultural transfer is a combination of a number of aspects: the object of transfer, a demand for an active reception of the transferred content, its transformative adaptation, subjects (human, institutional, infrastructural etc.) mediating these processes, wider contexts (historical, social, political, economic etc.) which make the transfer possible, and the effectiveness of the transfer, its scale, scope and consequences. The concept of cultural transfer can indeed be used as a comprehensive tool for constructing historical accounts of East Central European art history since it allows us to integrate research into, among others, the specificity of local artistic cultures, their comparative analysis, reconstruction of networks of contacts and exchanges, institutional analysis, the study of conditions of artistic production, and exhibition histories. However, certain clarifications of cultural transfer should be introduced to avoid confusion with the transfer taking place between two national cultures. We should consider network transfers or multilateral flows and try to proceed from the notion of transnational to trans-state history, where the question of nations is but one aspect of the story, and, above all, we should ask if through cultural transfers a sort of concrete universalism—singuniversalism or pluriversalizm—emerges.

Drawing on a Polish sociologist Andrzej Rychard's theory of "real communism" as an "institution" which consisted of both official-formal and informal structures and mechanisms, I will propose a conceptual model which goes beyond the simplistic and inoperative dichotomy of official versus unofficial and consists of several interconnected relational aspects: mainstream – alternative; formal – informal; capital – peripheral; public – semiprivate; traditionalist – moderate modern – experimental; aesthetic – sociocultural. This configuration promises to be more relevant and productive in actual cases where "official" and "unofficial" overlap.

Finally, I will present a short case study. The Labyrinth Gallery in Lublin, situated in a peripheral eastern part of Poland, was a formal institution operating under the aegis of the local Lublin Culture House. It’s alternative programme, which was initiated and animated by the director Andrzej Mroczek, was essentially open to contributions resulting from informal artistic networks between countries of East Central Europe and the West. A collective presentation of Polish neo-avant-garde artists Video Art of 1976 (commissioner: Józef Robakowski), which was organized at the gallery, can be interpreted in terms of a cultural transfer of the eponymous concept and the artistic genre it described. I will reconstruct how the transfer was initiated by de Appel Gallery in Amsterdam (which itself acted here as a node of a transcontinental network of the emerging video art scene), what the mutual interests and stakes behind the transfer there were in Polish and Dutch art milieus, and how the transfer was actively received and transformed in the Polish context.

How to think cultural contacts, transfers, translations within the Eastern European artistic-political context? How to delineate the geopolitical framework of Eastern Europe inside and beyond, in the broader context of internationality? Can we claim the authenticity of specifically Eastern European forms of cultural exchange? Does the Eastern European cultural space self-produce vis-a-vis the hegemonic sphere of Western modernity or does it actually reproduce already existing models, narratives and epistemologies?

I would like to speak about the materiality of contact and cultural exchange within the Eastern European and Yugoslav space, thinking about how to term these contacts, and how to narrate them (art) historically. The Biennial of Young Artists in Paris was one of the open meeting points for the so-called alternative scene in the 1970s in Eastern Europe and the West. The exhibition Works and Words (Amsterdam, 1979) was specifically conceived as the representation of the Eastern European non-conformist art in the West, although the original context was changed after the intervention of Goran Djordjevic, who criticized the compartmentation of the Eastern art Zoo. I will speak of different cases, including the BITEF Festival for performing arts in Belgrade, the exhibition and discursive programs of New Tendencies, the festival of art and technology in Zagreb (particularly the edition on socialist aspects of technology). One of the cases will be The Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, as the major exhibition in the region that assumed a multitude of cultural contacts: in Eastern Europe, in the West and in the Non-Aligned countries. However, The Biennial in Ljubljana didn’t change the paradigm – Western art remained presented in the central space, the minority of the Eastern European artists gave flavor of international representation, while the art from Non-Aligned countries was often shown in the lesser spaces, or represented as ethnographic objects, unless it had agitational, political value or belonged to the context of the so-called "naive" (folk art) that had significant value for the socialist artistic project. The smaller exchanges were more egalitarian and less representationalist, but not always situated outside the center-periphery relation (embedded in the notion of cultural transfer). I will mention the April Meetings in the Student Cultural Centre, Belgrade, the conference Comrade Women as one of the first autonomous feminist conferences in the East, Lutz Becker’s Eastern European art project, and the activities of Hungarian-Serbian group Bosh&Bosh.

chair: Magdalena Radomska

Cross-border exchanges in post-war Eastern European art history are often perceived as extraordinary moments, as privileged grounds of convergence between different cultures and individuals. They induce, as far as the not-yet-written histories of art in the region are concerned, exceptional artistic practices, interactions and situations. Due to nation-specific restrictions on freedom of movement in the socialist times, travelling abroad meant a lot to artists in this region: it was the open door through which fresh air came. In addressing this, a pluralized analysis of the East–East travel exchanges (still insufficiently researched at both the institutional and private exchange levels) can open up a wide range of informative perspectives on the life and work of particular artists and the representatives of new artistic practices which problematize the conflicting and (self-) colonial patterns of the West/East influence. These perspectives show us that that East/East relationships were of crucial importance to the practice of several artists (the connection to the West being a mere footnote in their biography), and help us understand why it is important to (theoretically) reposition how these exchanges are framed in order to apply a differentiated use of concepts and outline multiple operative models of intersubjective communication.

Such regional contacts stimulated various forms of artistic collaborations, syncretism, and favored cultural mediation. However, the revisitation and unfolding (or not) of their stories under the supervision of state-controlled institutions does not provide a miraculous key for answering the most important questions about the Eastern narratives of art. The interrupted and infrequent character of such institutional engagements typically focus on exceptional aspects and are not adequate for scrutinizing the larger picture of art in the region. Instead, they foreground elements that could be part of a social history of post-war art, filling in historical gaps and providing links between official history and private history (between what we get from the official sources and what we encounter when entering an artist’s archives).

By reflecting on the entanglement between micro- and macro-histories, I focus on a specific case study: the travels of Romanian artist Constantin Flondor to East Germany in 1968, 1972 and 1982, and the specific contacts he established with East-German artists via Robert Rehfeldt. Initially established via official routes (a 1968 excursion to East Germany organized by the Romanian Union of Fine Artists), his relationship to Rehfeldt and the circle of his artist friends resulted in a series of private dialogues (taking the form of long-term exchange of letters), Flondor’s participation in the mail art network, and a series of collective actions with East-German artists (in Dresden and on the Usedom Island, Uckeritz).

The Austrian artist Heinz Gappmayr and his Czech colleague Jiří Valoch knew each other since the mid-60s through their experiments in the field of visual and concrete poetry. From that point onwards, they developed a "professional" relationship that lasted throughout the following decades. In a constant dialogue, the two artists repeatedly exchanged their artistic creations. They were both very active in theoretical writing and shared similar thoughts on subjects like concrete or conceptual art. Through such interactions and thanks to his continuous collecting efforts and far-reaching international contacts, Jiří Valoch accumulated an impressive number of artworks by artists from inside and outside the Eastern bloc in his Brno apartment. His collection and archive, which is preserved today at the Moravian Gallery in Brno and the National Gallery in Prague, is a rich research object, not only for tracing Valoch’s exchange with Gappmayr but also for tracing the lines of his wide-ranging international network.

Heinz Gappmayr, who was born in Innsbruck in 1925 and is therefore twenty years older than Valoch, belonged to an earlier generation of participants in the field of concrete poetry. Using language as his artistic material, Gappmayr worked with a radically reduced selection of linguistic elements and categories, aiming to eliminate every trace of personal subjectivity in favor of maximum objectivity. Like Valoch, he saw himself in a tradition of concrete and constructive art. At the same time, he reflected intensively on the relation of his work to conceptual art. In Innsbruck, where he resided his entire life, he maintained close ties to the Studio UND in Munich—an important contact for Valoch as well. In Gappmayr’s and Valoch’s artistic and theoretical practice there are remarkable similarities: both are practitioners of visual poetry, both live and work outside the capital cities of their countries (Prague and Vienna), both wield influence from the periphery, and they share the same personal network.

In this paper, I focus on their role as conceptual artists, taking into consideration the materiality of a "dematerialized" art practice. I question the specific role of media like text, photography or printed graphics in conceptual art as the ideal means of communication across geographical distance, physical and political borders, and in a historical situation where travelling across the Iron curtain was extraordinarily difficult for Czechoslovak citizens, especially in the 70s. In tracing these connections, I reflect on the development of conceptual art in the countries of Czechoslovakia and Austria and establish a narrative of conceptualism in Central Europe by bringing together two geographically neighboring, but politically antithetical regions: an Eastern-bloc country and the most Eastern country of "the West", right at the Iron Curtain. This case study aims to open wider considerations of local developments of conceptualism, revealing striking parallels and interrelations such as the significance of concrete art and neo-constructivist tendencies. In the framework of the conference, I discuss this moment as a transregional cultural transfer taking place in the private realm of these two artists, distinct from state relationships and official cultural exchange.

This paper proposes a new understanding of transnational art histories by focusing on a long-term friendship and artistic exchange between Polish conceptual intermedia artist Marek Konieczny (28.06.1936–4.03.2022) and his West-German neo-avant-garde artist colleague Klaus Groh (b. 1936). It draws on my extensive archival research at the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa at Bremen University and my doctoral dissertation. Konieczny travelled to Groh’s residence in Edewecht in Lower Saxony in 1973, having learnt information about Groh’s location from "I.A.C." (International Artists’ Cooperation), an initiative and newsletter Groh had started a year earlier. A robust mail (art) correspondence ensued, including postcards, letters, artist’s books, and exhibition catalogues. This postal exchange continued well into the 2000s. Groh, who was born in the Silesian town of Nysa, would become a lifelong friend of Konieczny, who was born in Sosnowiec, a part of the Silesian Metropolis. In this way, art has become a platform for deterritorialization (in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari) of national boundaries (and different regimes of capital), re-situating its operation in alternative regional frameworks. My paper will use the framework of Deleuze and Guattari (art’s rhizomatic and transversal operationality, becoming-other) to account for the dynamics of a-institutional cultural transfer at play in the Marek Konieczny/Klaus Groh relation. Groh’s friendship was fundamental to Konieczny’s artistic trajectory; it pushed him towards a becoming-other, offering a productive ungrounding of habitual cliches of thought and practice. In fact, one of the earliest manifestations of Think Crazy, called Sierpniowe Boże Narodzenie/August Christmas, took place on 8 August 1974 in the garden of Groh’s house in Edewecht. Konieczny has gained access to Groh’s extensive network of contacts, allowing him to exhibit in the Netherlands and culminating in their shared sojourn in San Francisco in 1975 where they participated in Ana Banana’s Banana Olympics. Konieczny’s erotic 16mm film series from 1975 thematizes the issue of the encounter, which is now reposed on an interpersonal, impersonal, and molecular level—a move confluent with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. In the 1990s, Konieczny considered art a "chain of individual transformations." My case study—alongside these art-philosophical insights—will allow me to elaborate a new conceptualization of cultural transfer.

chair: Pavlína Morganová

The Hungarian avant-garde culture that emerged in Vojvodina, a multi-ethnic region of Yugoslavia, has long operated in a kind of double marginalisation: it was deemed to be too Yugoslavian according to the Hungarian reception and too Hungarian for the Serbian, Slovenian and Croatian art critics. At the same time, this multifold peripherical position proved to be both an advantage and a disadvantage for Hungarian art in Yugoslavia, which was in close connection with the contemporary Yugoslavian art scene and was also based on the Hungarian Avant-Garde tradition. In terms of its local conditions, institutional system and network of contacts, it benefited to a large extent from the New Art Practice movement of the 1960s and 70s, which, with its conceptual, performative character and semiotic-theoretical background, encouraged the search for new visual languages. The locations further away from the central cities of Zagreb, Belgrade and Ljubljana, such as Subotica and the more urbanised Novi Sad, which showcased a Hungarian majority and a still partly feudal infrastructure, struggled more with issues such as backwardness, oppressive ruralism and aesthetic conservatism. The challenges included reversing the disadvantages, programmatically experiencing the interoperability of languages and cultures, and engaging in translocal and international networks.

In my presentation, I will rely on – apart from citing further authors – Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's notion of minority to interpret the functioning of the Yugoslavian Hungarian-Serbo-Croatian Bosch+Bosch Group and to illustrate its transcultural relations. During the 1970s, the group – which was established in the Hungarian-Serbian border town of Subotica – first came into contact with Hungarian progressive culture and, drawing on the traditions of historical Avant-Garde relations, made it their mission to ensure cultural continuity between the two scenes. Due to the aspects of their minority position in Yugoslavia, they represented a cultural identity that was fertile in its hybridity, defined primarily by the internationalism and experimentalism of contemporary Yugoslavian art. Thus, in my presentation, I will argue that the role of cultural mediation in the case of the Bosch+Bosch Group (which manifested in the organisation of various exhibitions and publications containing relevant information) was, in fact, formed by the larger patterns of the Yugoslavian scene. Consequently, I will also discuss the ambivalences highlighted by the private archival documents, which determined the dynamics of "Hungarian-Hungarian" relations due to the differing economic-political conditions.

The paper will deal with one of the key figures in Czechoslovak intermedia art, Milan Adamčiak. The principles of his work are linked to a participatory and cross-disciplinary approach to art. First, there is the multidimensional model of the artistic distribution of ideas that proceeds in several and often mutually conflicting spheres of application under the conditions of marginal existence. Second, Adamčiak created many of his works as paraphrases or pastiches of the work of world-renowned artists or homages to his artistic colleagues. For Adamčiak, hommage was a conscious principle: he appropriated and adapted, polemicized, paraphrased, and recontextualized to destabilize the modernist notion of originality and authorship. In 1969, Milan Adamčiak proclaimed the fusion of poetry, music, and action art, spheres that remained an essential aspect of his lifelong work. How he absorbed, mixed, and transformed the creative impulses of representatives of Czech experimental poetry and action art (Jiří Kolář, Josef Hiršal, Bohumila Grögerová, Milan Grygar, Ladislav Novák, Milan Knížák) remains not only unique but also stimulating in the context of transnational art histories between Czech and Slovak art in the period 1948–1989. The paper will attempt to clarify the concept of cultural transfer and analyze in more detail the ways and forms of shaping experimental thinking about art based on the principles of Fluxus, aleatoric music, and the open concept of a work of art. Adamčiak’s international contacts—especially his visits to the Music Biennale Zagreb (Muzički biennale Zagreb) and Warsaw Autumn Festival (Warsszawska Jeseń)—were formative for his practices in the 1970s. The paper also tries to compare the artist’s work with other cultural workers in Czechoslovakia during the decade who went beyond the vague definitions of official and unofficial art, namely Jiří Valoch and Július Koller.

The paper will investigate the status of Poznań in the 1970s, and in particular the role of Galeria Akumulatory 2 led by Jarosław Kozłowski from 1972, which hosted the Fluxus Festival in 1977 and functioned as the practical implementation of NET initiative’s principles (established by Kozłowski and Kostołowski in 1971). It was also where Hungarian art historian János Brendel was active and where Piotr Piotrowski developed his interests in the art of East-Central Europe as a student of Kozłowski. The paper will also elaborate on the structure of the international network established in Poznań, which served as the intersection of various regional environments (for example, Czechoslovakia, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary). This determined its status as what Piotr Piotrowski characterized as between informative and formative and is the point of departure for an investigation into collective practices employed in Poznań. These practices were based both on the nascent idea of alternative art practices and the shared notion of cooperation and collectivism entangled with the most experimental and radical Fluxus ideas rooted both in an antiestablishment and anticapitalist attitude. The NET initiative triggered a peculiar structure of exchange based on internationalism at its core, which functioned more as a paradigm for cooperation than as an end in itself. While NET has typically been understood as the way around censorship and limitations of the communist regime, the paper will investigate a neglected aspect of its proximity to the communist utopia. It will elaborate both on the notion of artworks resulting from the diversity of the initiative and on possible models of international cooperation intrinsic to it.

chair: Kristóf Nagy

Besides being one of the most prominent Czech body artists, the performance artist Petr Štembera was also an important communicator within the diverse network of artists on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain (it is telling that his name has the most entries of all artists in the index of Klara Kemp-Welch’s Networking the Bloc). As evidenced by his report on "Events, Happenings, Land-Art, etc. in Czechoslovakia", published in Lucy Lippard’s Six Years, Štembera was an important mediator of Czechoslovak art even before he produced his most significant performance pieces such as Grafting (1975) or Sleeping in a Tree (1975)—works that still excite the imagination today. Besides his many well-known foreign contacts (Jean-Marc Poinsot, Jorge Glusberg, Klaus Groh, Tom Marioni, Allan Kaprow, Chris Burden, Jarosłav Kozłowski, László Beke), Štembera was also in touch with artists in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium (Roger d’Hondt).

The paper’s authors aim to summarize Štembera’s contributions to art and cultural information transfer in the 1970s. The paper focuses on the information that Štembera shared with the outside world (for instance, his intensive contacts with Poland and Hungary meant that Czech artists had the chance to exhibit and perform in front of gallery audiences) and also in what he introduced to the domestic scene (for instance, by translating Marshall McLuhan’s iconic The Medium is the Message into Czech). In the 1970s, conceptual art was considered an information transmitter, and it is in this sense that we should understand all of Štembera’s activities, which compensated for the lack of free media while effectively resisting censorship.

The Czech art theorist and curator Jindřich Chalupecký is internationally known as an art critic and philosopher of post-war art who was one of the few figures in Eastern Europe to achieve prominence in both sides of the Iron Curtain. He is well known for his studies of Duchamp as an iconic figure of various movements in modern art and his fundamental role in interpreting the Soviet art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, in which he made many personal contacts from 1965 onwards.

In this paper I would like to focus on Chalupecký's role in the broader Eastern European framework. This concerns his transnational erudition and his ability to connect individual personalities, official and unofficial institutions and artistic communities, trends, and movements. No less important is his interpretation of the general artistic situation, which in his writings and personal agenda, expressed in lectures and correspondence defied the logic of the Cold War and the principles of dichotomy. Chalupecký was convinced that art in the "socialist world" of Central and Eastern Europe was developing in a unique way, and he tried to understand this phenomenon in a non-biased way.

When László Beke was commissioned to compile a selection of Hungarian artists to be presented at the 1979 Sydney Biennial titled "European Dialogue" he decided to exhibit his artist friends, not only from Hungary but also from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania—a clear sign of an intention to avoid any kind of national or regional representation, but also a provocation. He called these artists his friends even if he had never met some of them, since, as he wrote in the catalog, "For me, friendship means common fate, that is a kind of love, euphory, torture, base hostility, but first of all a fatal synchronicity." 

In my view, Beke’s idiosyncratic curatorial decision was not motivated by sheer extravagance, but a long-standing undertaking conceived in the second half of the 1960s. At that time, Beke was an art history undergraduate and started to learn Slovak so that he could transcend the regional isolation caused by the linguistic dissimilarity of the Hungarian language as well as the historical burdens of the monarchy, Trianon, and the diplomatic friendships enforced by the Warsaw Pact. Later, and as the research fellow in art history at the Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Beke participated in several expeditions on the occasion of symposia organized by AICA or socialist art institutions, and these very diplomatic excursions were the seeds of the unique international network he built up later. 

The paper examines Beke’s exchanges with his Czechoslovak, Polish, and Yugoslav "friends," the inspiration and vocabularies he acquired and developed through these dialogues. The Slovak art historian Tomáš Štrauss and the Czech art critic and theorist Jindřich Chalupecký were role models for Beke because of their good use of the various cultural and theoretical legacies of their multiethnic, multi-lingual, partly shared, partly divergent local contexts, and how they worked out their own conceptual thesaurus from (a critical approach to) Marxism, semiotics, and decentralized understandings of Modernism. It was essential for Beke to test and reinforce these theoretical transfers in the form of friendly, personal get-togethers, such as the meeting of Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian artists in György Galántai’s Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár in 1972, where Beke experimented with using conceptual and action art as a lingua franca to reconcile communication difficulties and the historically strained relationship between the participants. In his cooperation with Foksal and Remont Gallery in Warsaw, Beke also relied on his friendships to navigate his way through the challenge of how art in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe should relate to its social-political and increasingly global context. Finally, I examine Beke’s theoretical-translational and provocative-curatorial contribution to the debate between New Tendencies and New Art Practices in Zagreb in 1973. With these case studies, I endeavor to show how Beke’s East-European mission resonated with his contemporaries and what local idioms he could mediate transnationally in relation to local debates and confrontations.

This paper explores the background and different uses of terminology related to the term Ostkunst in the work and thought of Tomáš Štrauss. It explores the circumstances under which this term emerged, investigates its origins, and focuses on the contexts where it developed, and its applications. This contribution aims to shed light on the broader discourses of Ostkunst and Westkunst by analyzing the emergence and establishment of the doctrine of socialist realism in Eastern Germany and abstract art in Western Germany. The study revisits the controversial exhibition Westkunst that took place in Cologne in 1981. By entering the framework of the East/West conflict, Štrauss, who emigrated to Western Germany at the beginning of the 1980s, directly reflected in his texts on the propaganda of West Germany that tried to demonize the art of the so-called Eastern Block. By doing so, West German art discourse instrumentalized the entire cultural field with equally ideological mechanisms as those in the public discourses of the Communist party in Eastern Europe. As a direct witness of the Cold War in the cultural field, Štrauss identified himself as a defender of Central European space, in which the avantgardes and neo-avantgardes developed regardless of ideological-political issues and the rhetoric of Western culture – the so called Westkunst. This paper also examines selected archival materials, namely Štrauss’ correspondence and is largely based on the hitherto unexamined documentation stored in the Literature Archive of the Slovak National Library in Martin. The presentation is an attempt to evaluate the importance of Štrauss, his intellectual deeds, and his work as a theorist, art historian and art and culture critic, as well as a curator and thinker who, in his complex way of thinking, intertwined the Central European space into a single, natural whole.

chair: Dániel Véri

The presentation focuses on the cross-fertilization between the spheres of official and unofficial art in Romania, analyzing the role of international art exhibitions supported by "official", state-run institutions in promoting experimental art practices within the neo-avant-garde art circles during the progressive isolationist cultural politics promoted by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s "national communist" regime of the 1970s. My intention is to show that official art exhibitions may have functioned as sites of cultural encounters where multiple diffusions and understandings of art are produced, and to examine the potential to productively apply Hans Georg-Gadamer’s notion of "fusion of horizons" in the theory of intercultural translation borrowed mainly from post-colonial theory. In this respect, I claim that experimental art practices were adapted and translated within existing local artistic idioms, resulting in adapted linguistic structures with different cultural motivations and which were integrated within local micro-histories. Such adaptation took place within often divergent art critical discourses and art historical narratives, which also influenced not only the descriptive force of terminology, but also its normative uses. 

I intend to support this hypothesis by examining the circulation of alternative terminologies such as "humanist realism" and "contextual art" within the art critical and artistic discourse of the 1970s and in relation to adapted versions of political pop art, photo-realism and conceptual art to be found in the works produced by Ion Bitzan and Wanda Mihuleac’s during the 1970s and early 1980s. I take into account their participation in exhibitions such as the Romanian pavilion of the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paolo and Paris Biennales or Richard Demarco Gallery exhibitions, analyzing what Bitzan and Mihuleac exhibited, the national and international art critical reception, Bitzan and Mihuleac’s testimonies and correspondence, and the subsequent changes that took place in their practice.

In Czechoslovakia, the 1970s and 1980s was referred to by the ruling communists as the period of "normalisation". The political liberalization in the 1960s ended with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact army (21 August 1968). Nevertheless, the liberal atmosphere in culture and art survived another four years. Artists enjoyed freedom of expression and participated in official exhibitions in Czechoslovakia and abroad.

The situation changed radically after the second congress of the Association of Slovak Visual Artists in the autumn of 1972. All the artists who refused to adapt their work to the revival of socialist realism required by the ideologues were excluded from the Association, losing the opportunity to participate in the official cultural life and present their work in public. As a result, these artists established an alternative space, which I call the unofficial art scene. By organizing private exhibitions in flats and studios, they confirmed their status as independent artists. However, without the possibility to show their works abroad, their names would fall into oblivion.

The exhibitions organized by Sándor Pinczehelyi at the Pécs Gallery are among the most important in terms of the resonance of unofficial Slovak artists in the Euro-American art context. The concept of the exhibitions did not reflect the world divided by politics. Pinczehelyi focused on graphics and drawing, which allowed the unofficial artists to escape the attention of censors by sending their works as letters, and thus participate in international exhibitions alongside world-famous artists.

The first Slovak artist to participate in Pinczehelyi´s 1976 exhibition "Modern Graphic Art" was Jozef Jankovič and he was followed by Peter Bartoš, Juraj Bartusz, Ľubomír Ďurček, Rudolf Fila, Stano Filko, Michal Kern, Július Koller, Juraj Meliš, Marián Mudroch, Rudolf Sikora, and Dezider Tóth. Pinczehelyi broke down art disciplinary barriers and opened the exhibition to all artists regardless of their specialization. His broad-minded, unusually open concept also included conceptual and action art.                

This paper covers a variety of exhibitions curated by Sándor Pinczehelyi. By comparing the language of expression of artists from socialist countries with that of the artists representing the Euro-American art scene, the paper will try to articulate the place of these artists on the international map of visual arts of the time.

Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź has been one of the most important institutions dedicated to modern and contemporary art in the region of Central and Eastern Europe since the mid-1960s. This period has largely coincided with the management of the museum by Ryszard Stanisławski, who throughout his entire term as director (until 1991) used his international contacts and political standing to implement, as far as possible, his own program policy and to connect the museum with other institutions in Europe and around the world.

One of the pillars of Stanisławski’s programming policy was constant cooperation in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. This was motivated by both political prescription (the state-imposed policy of propagating the art of Soviet Republics and transnational socialism) and the actual interests of the team of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (for example, Urszula Czartoryska or Jadwiga and Jacek Ojrzyńscy).

There have been regrettably few studies devoted to Stanisławski’s term in office and, of those that do exist, the majority merely emphasize and problematize his merits in exporting Polish art abroad. To date, there has been no deeper reflection on the specificity of cultural exchange between the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and its significance for the region.

Based on examples (case study) from the institutional history of the Museum of Art and the curatorial and diplomatic activities of Ryszard Stanisławski, I will try to illustrate the main directions, themes, and nature of the program policy of the Muzeum Sztuki in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1970s. It will also be necessary to indicate the social and political determinants of these activities and the uniqueness of the cultural exchange between the countries behind the Iron Curtain.

In 1975 in Poland, mail art constituted an important source of international materials and contacts, yet a number of artists sought opportunities for personal meetings. At the same time, the notions of contact and human interaction were extremely important and were explored more broadly in art, beyond the specificity of mail art. This recognition coincides with the apparent change of paradigms in the Polish avant-garde art at the time, and 1975 appears to be a moment of reevaluation of existing approaches and modes of communicating within and outside the networked activities. 

The increase in the number of international artists visiting Poland significantly overlaps with their participation in the mail art network, which posits questions about the modes of connectedness in art. The F-Art festival of contemporary art provides an important case study for an analysis of how artists responded to the notions of contact, communication and togetherness while visiting a country they had usually reached via post. 'The symposium of Recent Art F-Art' (also referred to as the F-art Counterculture Festival or as the Festival of Students from Baltic Art Schools) held in Gdańsk in 1975 was officially organized by the Academic Council of the Socialist Union of Polish Students of the Fine Arts Academy in Gdańsk (RU SZSP PWSSP) with Romuald Kutera, Lech Mrożek and and Piotr Olszański acting as its commissioners. At F-Art, the presence of experimental international art and visits by foreign artists both from the socialist satellite states and from the West to a large extent resulted from the development of the network in Poland and its particular cultural policies that the artists negotiated and managed to use to their advantage. This transition from dialogue mediated through artworks into personal conversations and projects relying on collaboration is central to my analysis of the F-Art festival. The international symposium became a foundation for projects realized abroad and at home that proposed new models of art and modes of engagement. 

The year 1975 was a breakthrough moment in the history of Polish mail art regarding the realisation of aspirations for international presence and personal meetings. A number of mail art exhibitions held in 1975 at publicly accessible and state-supported galleries such as Galeria Studio and Galeria Labirynt—rather than in private apartments—broadened the audience of the networked art while asserting its presence and the authorities’ sanction. This paper looks at the changes of the paradigm of artistic exchanges and shifts within the networked practice that manifested in 1975 in Poland.