What might the historical study of past exhibitions of contemporary art entail and allow? While seeking to resist disciplinary claims in the name of art’s “exhibition histories”, this presentation will share some heuristics that might prove generative under this banner. Drawing on written, editorial, teaching and curatorial work, it will focus on fifteen years of the Exhibition Histories series of publications, which have analysed eclectic shows around the world since the 1950s.

The exhibition is a medium for the presentation, legitimation, communication and distribution of art and therefore plays a significant role in reconstructing the past. In the emerging discipline of Exhibition Histories, art history narratives are often based on interpretations of paradigmatic exhibitions. Physical reconstructions of past exhibitions represent materialised visual forms of Exhibition Histories and confirm the importance of the exhibition qua medium as a specific tool for the construction of alternative art history narratives. This materialised memory of exhibitions provides a more vivid and immediate critical platform for an informed public than is offered by the parallel, and now relatively extensive, publication of Exhibition Histories in the discipline of Western art history.

Reconstructing past exhibitions is therefore a specific form of remembering and creating the Exhibition Histories narrative. Reesa Greenberg, who has conducted extensive research into this subject, uses the term “remembering exhibition”. This generic term encompasses not only the physical reconstruction of past exhibition events, but also the very act of temporally linking the present to the past. In the West, physical reconstructions are associated with the curatorial boom of the 1990s and contemporary exhibition practice. However, these are mostly affirmations of the Western paradigm of universalist art history and do not reflect the new geography of art. In this context, we should ask what positions exhibition reconstructions might offer for the history of Eastern European art and its international canonisation? Is it desirable for us to try to infiltrate into the Western canon, or rather to create horizontal narratives, as Piotr Piotrowski suggested, even within the Exhibition Histories discipline? What approaches to memorialising exhibitions are acceptable for the West and necessary for the East? And are such reconstructive attempts at art of the “periphery” even desired by the West?

The physical reconstruction of Eastern European art exhibitions, especially those held before 1989, is still a crucial task both internally, i.e. for the national art historiography of individual Eastern Bloc states, and externally, in order to fill the gaps in the story of Western art history. They thus make visible the otherwise often invisible histories of contemporary local art, which, on the one hand, might correct earlier regional historical narratives, and, on the other, enable a broader understanding of possible alternatives and parallels to the global art history canon. In addition to defining the basic conditions of “remembering exhibitions” and their main forms according to Reesa Greenberg's typology, this paper also sets forth two examples of possible exhibition reconstructions using the Czech art context of the 1960s.

In order to promote a better understanding of how art exhibitions were an essential ingredient of 1960s cultural politics and diplomacy, this paper will contextualise the Henry Moore show that toured Bucharest, Bratislava, Prague and Budapest from 1966 to 1967.

Considered the most extensive international retrospective of the artist, the exhibition, organised in cooperation with the local authorities in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, featured works spanning from 1924 until 1964. All four stops were the result of a cultural exchange programme with the Eastern Bloc managed by the British Council – in exchange for hosting Moore’s show, the cooperating countries were offered the opportunity to organise similar events in the UK.

Drawing on archival material, periodicals and interviews, this paper will provide an insight into the stories behind these exhibitions and will investigate their role in taming political tensions and conflicting ideologies after 1960. In addition, it will demonstrate that although the reception of Moore’s work was different in each venue, its presence often impacted individual artistic careers or reinforced ideas and tendencies already present within the cultural landscape of these countries in the 1960s.

This joint paper will draw on the exhibition of the same name curated by Lujza Kotočová, Alina Șerban and Daniel Véri at the National Museum of Art of Romania (Bucharest, 2021), and will critically evaluate the key outcomes of the related research.

This presentation analyses how the Danish artists of the group Cobra (1948–1951) suddenly appeared in front of exhibitions organised by the Danish state touring state-socialist countries during the Cold War, ca. 1960–1980s. These exhibitions represented a rare opportunity to experience Nordic modern art in the societies of state socialism, where the spontaneous abstraction of Asger Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Egill Jacobsen and others was promoted as an official image of Danish culture.

By following the institutional framework of these exhibitions, we have a unique opportunity to observe the overlooked intersection between cultural diplomacy and exhibitions and “exhibition diplomacy” as a medium within the context of the Cold War. Did exhibitions contribute to a new Ostpolitik of “change through rapprochement”, in which Denmark was especially active? This question is even more remarkable as the members of Cobra were protagonists of a radical political avant-garde idea. Most artists were involved to varying degrees in the Communist Party from the 1930s to the 1950s, possibly until a cultural policy favouring realism was formulated by the Danish Communist Party (DKP) in 1948. How did these artists view these exhibitions as part of Western cultural diplomacy and Ostpolitik? And how were these exhibitions actually received in societies of state socialism?

The presentation will cover the exhibitions Danska Umetnost/ Wystawa vspolczesnej Szuki Dúnskiej (Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Warsaw 1961), Wystawa Malarstawa Egilla Jacobsena (DANIA) (Warsaw 1965), Három dán festő a Cobra-mozgalomból/ Troje malarzy z grupy “Cobra” (Budapest and Warsaw 1980), and Danish Artists of the Cobra Group (Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, Prague, and East Berlin 1986–88). Given the character of the material, the presentation will also examine how to research exhibitions between the art world and geo-political contexts and how to access materials on the verge of art history.

I will propose that exhibitions of modern art were an especially prominent diplomatic tool from around1960 to the mid-1970s, predominantly based on exchanges between the smaller states on each side of the Iron Curtain. During this period, exhibition formats evolved from being broader presentations of national art to less formal presentations of specific artists and groups. The featured artists were often personally involved and smaller museums in Denmark became committed partners in cultural diplomacy, as is evident in the exhibition Danish Artists of the Cobra Group, which included a presentation of new museums in Denmark as a cultural model and medium for exhibitions.

My text will examine selected exhibitions of artists from Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America organised by Jaroslaw Kozlowski, which put on display works Kozlowski acquired through the NET initiative on the basis of their material conditions, for example, the artists’ material conditions, spatial conditions, finances, and the relations and modes of production. The text is a response to some of the accusations made in Piotr Piotrowski’s recent book (soon to be published in English by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory). Piotrowski maintained that certain Eastern European NET artists, unlike their counterparts from the Global South (such as Horacio Zabala from Argentina, Angelo de Aquino (Brazil), Guillermo Deisler (Chile)), conducted a global exchange that was informative and not, as in the case of the South American artists, formative. In this text, I will analyse the exhibitions at the Accumulators 2 Gallery, taking into account the factors identified earlier, in order to effectuate the material analysis postulated by James Elkins and Piotrowski. The aim will be to assess how strongly artists from both regions were embedded in the material conditions of their own work, namely, in the Marxist base, and whether this influenced the nature of the work collected and exhibited by Kozlowski. The text looks at how global art institutions were shaped in the 1970s in Eastern Europe. In 2022, Jaroslaw Kozlowski donated the NET collection to the city of Poznan. The collection is held at Poznan’s Arsenal Gallery, and, in accordance with the wishes of its director, Professor Marek Wasilewski, and Jaroslaw Kozlowski, will be looked after by the Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research on East-Central European Art. 

After cooperating artistically as the KwieKulik Duo for almost two decades, the Polish artists Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik split in 1988 and began their respective individual careers. At the same time, their joint work from the 1970s and 1980s continued to be presented at numerous exhibitions both in Poland and abroad, since it had already begun to be historicised in the early 1990s. In my paper I will sketch an “afterlife” of KwieKulik's art as produced through the medium of collective exhibitions and viewed through the lens of the methodology of Exhibition Histories. Focusing on selected events from the period between 1989 and 2006, such as Polish Chic/Array (1991), The Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present (1998), Polonia-Polonia (2000), The Grey in Colour 1956–1970 (2000), 2000+ Arteast Collection (2000), and Interrupted Histories (2006), I will analyse how the identity, artistic position and historical meanings of KwieKulik's work was being transformed, re-established and rewritten by what could be called the exhibitions’ “performatives”. Having acquired a number of historical layers, the body of work in question has also become a singular encapsulation of and a testimony to the changing identity of East-Central European art history.

During the 1990s, contextual shows with strong socio-political and cultural dimensions presented KwieKulik's work as an example of the critical experience and embodiment of Polishness under actually existing state socialism in the People's Republic of Poland. One such exhibition even cited it as an example of a new Polish national art that could de-centre and rewrite the traditional post-Romantic national canon.

The same decade also saw Zofia Kulik's individual post-KwieKulik achievements being featured at large international exhibitions which, still operating within the framework of Cold War assumptions, were attempting to include art from East-Central Europe into the Western canon by representing the region’s collective identity as the sum of individual national particularities. Kulik's highly successful individual career and her exemplarity as a post-socialist artist created a precondition for the reintroduction of KwieKulik's oeuvre into the institutional  art circuit at the turn of the millennium. During this period, the duo's achievements played a major role in the self-emancipation of East-Central European art history as it became part of exhibitions which strove to construct more horizontal, contextual, comparative and connectivist narratives, and invent an alternative geocultural agenda for the region as a trendsetter for a “transnational of the peripheries”.

My focus will be on the reasons for selecting particular works by KwieKulik, their relationship to the curatorial concept and the exhibition’s narrative, especially in terms of the “argument” they provided for the statements the exhibition was intending to make, and finally, how they were re-contextualised by other works on display and by the reception accorded the show. 

This paper offers a retrospective evaluation of the project Parallel Chronologies, which was launched in 2009 in order to develop new methodologies for researching and sharing the exhibition histories of the former Eastern Europe. It reflects on the benefits and limitations of the various methodologies applied during the project.

One important decision was to focus on chronologies rather than on the landmark events that had been at the centre of several earlier projects preparing the ground for the new discipline  of exhibition histories. This decision was motivated by the observation that on the art scenes of East Europe it was often smaller scale and less documented events that introduced important innovations into the genre of exhibition, as well as into the curatorial and artistic strategies relating to the divided nature of the public sphere. Another challenge that had to be confronted related to the fact that several rival and contradictory readings and memories of these Cold War era art events coexisted locally and on the transnational level. Parallel Chronologies did not endeavour to create an objective history by means of the synthesis or reconciliation of differing individual accounts. Instead, the aim was to juxtapose multiple documents that together could contribute to a multifaceted reconstruction of event-series and processes. Another defining strategy involved a critical re-evaluation of the tendency at that time to fetishise the non-official nature of various events and strategies.

These methodologies were developed based on our research into the local art scene, and the project outcomes were presented in the form of exhibitions and publications. Upon extending the project to the regional level, we launched a website using what at that time was a typical blog format with backdated posts, and invited colleagues from other East European countries to contribute chronologies of their local art scenes to this platform. This phase of the project raised questions regarding our methodological preliminaries and provided us with invaluable insights into the differences and similarities that existed between institutional systems and power relations on the art scenes of Eastern-bloc socialist countries. Most importantly, the initial idea to present parallel chronologies of local art scenes, which implied a national framework, proved to be highly problematic, especially since the borders and lines of division between these scenes changed dramatically during the ongoing post-socialist transition period. This paper also proposes various possible points of interconnection between local art histories, through which parallel narratives may be connected into polyphonic transnational or regional histories, thus leaving behind narrow national configurations.

In 1961, the Central Bureau for Art Exhibitions in Warsaw presented an exhibition of woodcuts by Shikō Munakata (1903–1975). The show took place at the same time as the artist, known for seeking inspiration in Japanese folk art and Buddhism, was gaining international recognition. In 1955, Munakata received an award at the 3rd São Paulo Biennial, and in 1956, he was the first Japanese artist to receive the Grand Premi at the 28th Venice Biennale. My aim is not to offer a history of Polish-Japanese cultural diplomacy (whose contacts included the participation of Polish artists in the International Biennial Exhibition of Prints in Tokyo), but rather to pose questions regarding visual time and global art geopolitics in exhibition histories (picking up on arguments conducted by, among others, Keith Moxey and Piotr Piotrowski). What does it mean that some exhibitions and artists appeared at the “right time and place”, as “modern” or “avant-gardist”, while others were considered “anachronistic” and did not “hit the big time”? How is a global history of exhibitions in Central and Eastern Europe possible? To what extent have official international exhibitions contributed to challenging cultural stereotypes while being subjected to censorship and other political entanglements?

Why study exhibitions, especially from a geographically and historically determined perspective? What does this situated perspective bring to the study of exhibitions as a global field of research, and what does the latter bring to the art historiography in and of the Central and Eastern European region? The short answer would be: the opportunity to identify blind spots in current art historiography and to debunk entrenched assumptions when writing national, regional and global art histories, and the chance to offer new ways of elaborating a (self-)critical art history and rethinking transnational and “trans-peripheral” art historiography as a substitute for the homogenising “global” idiom.

 This paper will examine three major methodological possibilities of approaching exhibitions as art historical events: as theoretical objects, as contact zones, and as emotional micro-communities. The first approach raises the issue of curatorial thinking and exhibitionary epistemology, pointing to the idea of “entangled scales of analysis”, while the other two question broad notions of cultural translation, transference and adaptation, while interrogating the political infrastructure of socialist exhibition networks during the 1960s and 1970s.

In my presentation, I would like to focus on the role of exhibition makers in the second half of the 20th century in Czechoslovakia. Special attention will be paid to the following questions: What were the institutional conditions for their work? How did the entire system of organising contemporary art exhibitions influence their outcomes? Since when have we been able to talk about a curatorial turn in Czech art? And last but not least: was the creation of the new profession of curator also interpreted as a position of power? Did it raise more doubts among artists or among critics?

I would also like to discuss the methodological issues that arose while writing the book Exhibition as a Medium. Czech Art 1957–1999 (with Pavlína Morganová and Dagmar Svatošová, VVP AVU, 2020). Can we use the categories of contemporary art formulated in the West for older periods of art in a 20th-century socialist state, or is this inappropriate? Is it legitimate to compare, for example, exhibition makers in the 1960s in Czechoslovakia with today’s independent contemporary art curators, or is this the ahistorical application of non-existing criteria? But what, then, should we call these exhibition makers: commissioners, pre-curators, curators... or something else entirely?

In June 1966, an exhibition entitled “La Figuration Narrative” took place at the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague, co-organised by the art critics Gérald Gassiot-Talabot and Eva Petrová. Accompanied by a catalogue with the subtitle “Continuous Style, Temporal Juxtapositions, Cloisonnés and Polyptychs, Itineraries and Metamorphoses”, this event presented a variation on “La figuration narrative dans l’art contemporain” (“Narrative figuration in contemporary art”), which Gassiot-Talabot had shown a year earlier at the Galerie Creuze in Paris. It also included elements of one of his earlier projects, “Mythologies quotidiennes” (“Daily Mythologies”) (1964). The works on show were characterised by the incorporation of popular iconography (comics, film, advertising), an emphasis on narrative sequences, and an often critical stance towards current social and political events.

“La Figuration Narrative” took place in a context of active transnational artistic and critical exchange, prompted by various events, including the 9th Congress of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) held in Prague and Bratislava in September–October of the same year. Three years later, in 1969, “Nová figurace”, organised by Eva Petrová at the Mánes Gallery/exhibition hall in Prague, featured works by Czech artists such as Věra and Vladimír Janoušek, Karel Nepraš, Eva Kmentová, Adriena Šimotová, Alena Kučerová, Jiří Balcar and Jiří Kolář. Based on an analysis of the catalogues, critical texts and press articles from that time, this paper will revisit the conditions for the realisation and reception of these two exhibitions. In particular, it will highlight the points of intersection and divergence between the conception of narrative figuration that emanated from Gassiot-Talabot’s projects, which emerged from a context of anti-institutional protest in France and a desire to link art to political action. It will also examine the perspectives from which Czech critics and artists approached this same idea of narrative figuration within a post-1968 environment informed by a radically distinct set of aesthetic and socio-political experiences. 

My presentation will be devoted to the International Exhibition of Women Artists (Képzőművésznők Nemzetközi Kiállítása) that took place in 1960 in Műcsarnok in Budapest. It is one of the very few examples of an international, all-women show organised during the period of state socialism. The exhibition brought together artists from Hungary, Romania, Poland, Italy, the German Democratic Republic and Sweden (i.e. from both sides of the Iron Curtain), and was organised to celebrate the 50th anniversary of International Women’s Day. In my presentation, I will reconstruct the network of both female socialist activists and the curators or artists associated with them who initiated and prepared the exhibition. I will also examine the ideas about women, women’s place in society, and women’s art that the show embodied. I am particularly interested in how analyses of the International Exhibition of Women Artists can contribute to debates around state socialism in the Eastern Bloc and its international alliances.

This paper deals with a somewhat niche aspect of Exhibition Histories. It draws on the discipline’s methodology in order to analyse permanent exhibitions in various Czech museums and galleries of art installed in the 1990s, when the social impact of the entire discipline of art history was much stronger than it is now. Having access to a permanent exhibition detailing the story of Czech art of the 20th century was widely regarded as a public right, as well as a pressing task for art historians and museum curators. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, art history was perceived as a sphere with social responsibility, and its representatives were expected to comment on contemporary social events. It was subjected to similar demands as the work of general, political, or economic historians, i.e. there was an expectation that it would seek to explain and legitimise the current situation by analysing its genesis. The causes of this state of affairs stem from the widely shared need for what was called historical rectification and reparation. It was against this background that the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the National Gallery in Prague, and other institutions created permanent exhibitions ignoring the official art of state socialism and canonising modern art that had previously existed in varying degrees of unofficiality.

This paper asks what the narratives promoted by these exhibitions can tell us about Czech identity of the 1990s. What did curators highlight, and above all what concepts were accepted into our shared interpretation of the recent past of state socialism? In short, I would like to examine how the first permanent exhibitions in this country (visited by schools, the general public and tourists) participated in the creation of the current Czech identity.

In spring 1970, the National Gallery in Prague put on show works by the renowned Polish avant-garde artist Henryk Stażewski (1894–1988), namely, forty of his geometric abstract reliefs made in 1967–1969. The exhibition formed part of the collaboration between the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź and the National Gallery in Prague, which began in 1967 as a result of personal contacts between the new directors of both institutions, Ryszard Stanisławski and Jiří Kotalík. This paper analyses archival documents and press reactions to the exhibition in light of the Polish-Czechoslovak exhibition exchange, artistic debates, and the cultural politics of the time. The display merged two seemingly disparate art worlds. It was organised by important public institutions under the terms of the agreement entered into on cultural cooperation between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and Polish People’s Republic. Nevertheless, the show promoted the interwar avant-garde, geometric abstraction, constructivism, and formal experiments. The Czech press noted that it was the first opportunity to see Polish abstract art. The critics viewed Stażewski’s work as a link between the interwar avant-garde and contemporary art, a bridge between two generations. This study reveals the changing status of abstraction and modernism in post-1968 Poland and Czechoslovakia. It charts the intersections of the official and unofficial circulation of art, the convergence of the controlled programme of state art institutions, and the avant-garde legacy. In addition, it shows how museum directors acted both as art professionals wanting to promote modernism on the one hand, and as state officials reporting to the communist Ministry of Culture and Art, juggling artistic and political goals, on the other. The analysis of the transfer between the National Gallery in Prague and the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź offers an example of exhibition history viewed as an institutional “horizontal art history”, to draw on Piotr Piotrowski’s concept, and adds another layer to the map of artistic contacts within the Eastern Bloc.

Art exhibitions in Czechoslovakia under the dictatorship of the Communist Party are usually discussed under split headings: the official and unofficial, or progressive and conservative. But the identification of “unofficial” with “progressive” lacks a theoretical basis, while the criteria governing our definition of “unofficial” are not comprehensive. I would like to suggest that such a priori differentiation tends to undermine our attempts at the reconstruction of a convincing image of the histories of art, art criticism and art history during the period of Late Socialism, i.e. in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s and 80s.

After some theoretical considerations and a brief overview of the main political and cultural contexts, my contribution will deal with the exhibitions organised by the National Gallery in Prague. The selection will include the most notable exhibitions of old and modern art, those mounted in Prague, in regional galleries and abroad, authored and curated both by employees of the central institution and guest curators. Wherever there is extant archival documentation or interviews with witnesses, I will also discuss the institutional processes that fed into the realisation of individual exhibitions. A pattern of preferences and conflicts may arise that will provide a basis for the evaluation of individual cases. The final question I will seek to answer will be as follows: What was the role of the exhibitions organised by the National Gallery in respect of a broadly defined “cultural opposition” inside Czech culture during the 1970–80s?

Taking as a starting point a series of hostile comments made by American critic Lucy Lippard on the politics of a show curated by Russian artists Rimma and Valery Gerlovin in early 1980s New York, this paper explores various unintended and intentional misunderstandings among art workers and countercultural figures whose political positions were formed in different centres and peripheries. Drawing on Theodore Roszak’s 1969 classic, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition, I argue that the difficulties experienced by members of the counterculture in establishing bonds of solidarity with potentially like-minded groups were shared by alternative artists working internationally post-1968. Arguing that alternative art should be viewed as part of a shared, anti-technocratic project, I propose that these glitches in communication are worth lingering over as we continue to grapple with different accounts of historical developments and seek to find ways of working across borders in polarised times.