Chair: Emese Kürti

This presentation discusses the connections between art and politics concerning the countries of the Second (Socialist) World during the Cold War and especially in the 1970s and 1980s. In the first place, it engages with the institutional contacts between the two regions through the example of the Museum of Solidarity established in Chile in 1971, and its relationship with the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. In the second place, it looks at the parallel forms of creating against dictatorial backgrounds in South America and Eastern Europe. In this sense, I will analyze the different artistic discourses in the two regions that engage with an aesthetics of poverty, marginality, and ‘historias minimas’ and argue, that although created in parallel, these artistic creations could be read as similar/comparable reactions to politically oppressive regimes.

My presentation focuses on the experimental art scene in Lima during the military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975).1 This period of Peruvian history was marked by the industrialization of the country, an increasing growth of mass media and consumer culture, and an intensification of urban culture.

Velasco Alvarado’s government was characterized by a leftist-oriented military administration with original social, cultural, and educational reforms. In this context, the government introduced a series of cultural policies to democratize culture and foster social change. In order to achieve this, the government hired some artists and intellectuals, who contributed to the cultural policies and/or the education reform, as well as to the communication and propaganda of the regime.

Since 2007, a new theory of Peruvian contemporary art of this period has been circulating in both academic and commercial art circuits, in Latin America and in several English-speaking countries. One of the main aims of this theory was to insert the experimental art scene from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s in the Latin American conceptualist canon. In order to do this insertion, this theory has made the following associations: first, Velasco Alvarado’s administration is labeled as repressive and violent, suggesting a tension and an environment not suitable for artistic experimentation, which – according to this theory – the artists contested through their practice. Second, the government has been disapproved for being nationalistic and conservative, leaving unnoticed the innovative cultural policies of this government, aiming for the democratization of culture and social change. Third, this insertion of the Peruvian experimental art in the Latin American conceptualist canon has led to a major generalization, paralleling Velasco Alvarado’s administration with other military administrations of the same period in South America, without individuating the particularity of the Peruvian military administration.

As we will see in the example of the experimental scene in Lima from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, the artists’ critical positioning was directed against the institutional framework of the art scene of that time, and not against the government’s policies. In fact, neither the artists criticized the government, nor Velasco Alvarado’s administration impeded their practice. Quite the contrary happened, as the government hired some of these artists for the sake of the implementation of some of its reforms.

This theory, which has reinterpreted the history of the art of this period, is the one that is circulating in the international academic circuit and has not been revised. I question the accuracy of it, by showing examples of works of that period, comparing how they were presented in their original context and how they have been reinterpreted from today’s perspective. Moreover, I connect the missing links of this theory, by presenting the overlooked side of the story with examples of works by experimental artists who contributed to the government’s cultural policies.

I argue that the market in need of “critical works” and the framework of the revaluation of the historiography of the art of the 1960s to 1980s in Latin America have shaped the Peruvian contemporary art discourse. These new interpretations of the past may disregard part of history, especially when it comes to speaking about a military government, such as Velasco Alvarado’s. Further, it created a new historiography of the contemporary art scene, oftentimes far from the artists’ intentions. This situation illustrates a phenomenon in the current historiography of art in Perú, in which the curators and critics create the scene, and not its main actors, the artists.

1 Also known as the first term (1968-1975) of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (1968-1980) (GRFA for its Spanish acronym).

During his tenure at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Ryszard Stanisławski had continued cultural (artistic) exchange between Poland and Latin and South America, which was exemplified by the numerous shows exhibited in the late ’60s and almost the whole 1970s. As a curator of the Polish exhibition or as a member of the international jury during Sao Paulo Bienal in the 60s, Stanisławski successively built his network in this region and become a natural choice to lead some of the further artistic collaboration. From a Eurocentric perspective, these events in the history of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (as well as the presence of artists from the Global South in the collection) have never attracted attention until now, when a non-Eurocentric revision of history sheds new light on art history, including institutional histories. In my talk, I would like to take a closeup of the few examples from the Muzeum Sztuki history (and Stanisławski’s activity) of cooperation of the peripherical representatives in a larger context of Cold War alliances between Eastern Bloc countries and Global South in the late ’60s and ’70s. Critical revision of these contacts allows us to notice that cooperation, even though it was a manifestation of the weakness of the system, not its strength, nowadays gives a new field for interpreting program policy, and more broadly, cultural policy. The meeting and cooperation of art institutions of two peripheral countries can be perceived through the prism of the relations established at that time, as a promise of art circulation beyond the conventionally recognized centers.

In 1963–1964, a several-month scenography workshop intended for Cuban artists took place in Havana, Cuba. Its tutors were prominent Slovak stage designer Ladislav Vychodil and costume designer Ludmila Purkyňová, both representatives of the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava. It was organized as part of the fulfillment of the Czechoslovak-Cuban Agreement of Cultural Cooperation, which was signed in 1960 as the first of its kind in post-revolutionary Cuba. According to several of Vychodil's statements in Czechoslovak press and the official language of related diplomatic correspondence, the rhetoric of the workshop was strongly Europocentric, which corresponded to the Czechoslovak propaganda: Through the support of a culturally advanced European country, a completely new field of Cuban culture was supposed to be established, while its initial level was very low or did not exist at all.

Among the workshop participants, there was Raúl Martínez, who is nowadays considered one of the most renowned Cuban artists of the post-revolutionary era and whose works create part of the Cuban revolutionary iconography. He was then an experienced graphic designer but a rather frustrated abstract expressionist painter. In the mid-1960s, however, he experienced a radical shift in his artistic work toward pop art. It further led to the development of his own visual language in the late 1960s. In an interview, published on the occasion of his solo exhibition in Havana in the summer of 1964, he commented on this shift explicitly by admitting that he followed Ladislav Vychodil's advice to approach three-dimensional scenography with a similar form of collage that he used in his typographic work. While being satisfied with the result of his scenography attempts, he started to apply this principle also in painting. He became successful and, despite being clearly associated with devices used in the pop art of the US authors, Cuban cultural officials didn't find his work problematic not even in the so-called Grey Period of the 1970s (although he didn't escape persecution for his sexual orientation either).

It would be daring to attribute this single contact of a young revolutionary artist with an established stage designer from the region where, according to Piotr Piotrowski, no great pop art could develop, some greater significance in the emergence of a local version of pop art in Cuba. This study should, however, point out the complexity of the cultural relationships between both countries. In the framework of the bipolar world, they belonged to the same side, while in the global perspective of the relationships between center and periphery, they were both in a certain sense peripheries. Furthermore, in Piotrowski's terminology, the non-European Other, which occupied the position of the distant Other, and the eastern-European Other, which is close, European, but marginalized. But even within these two Others, one could clearly be considered as the colonizer and one the colonized.

chair: Zsuzsa László

The current proposal will address the mid-1970s photographic practices of Romanian artists Ion Grigorescu and Ion Dumitriu exploring their engagement with the topic of poverty, their particular way of understanding the role of the artist, and of photography in approaching, capturing and discussing those snatches of reality that are scorned or ignored, because they are so banal that the eye no longer registers them. Reflecting a mechanism of absorption into the everyday life and a process of rejection of authorship, the new position of the artists’ working practices are analysed starting from Ion Grigorescu’s article published in 1973 in ARTA magazine, „On the Realist Artist”. The text conceptualizes a new profile of socially-engaged artist, „the realist artist”, a direct, critical note on the artificiality of the Socialist Realism ideological construct and the manipulation of social themes as framed by the official propaganda, which points towards the discovery of a new kind of realism in art. The realism theorized by Ion Grigorescu is the realism of non-authorial gestures, the one that eliminates phantasm, spectacularism and present us with the situation as it exists on the ground, without special effects, without any pretence to discover something new/ or reinventing the language of art, leaving “the vague vague, the real real, the flowing flowing, etc.”[1] The kind of realism performed in the photographs of Ion Grigorescu and Ion Dumitriu, describing low-class people, peripheries of the cities, the urban landfills, compels to a three-level reading, as Grigorescu suggests in his text. The psychic, the historical and the social are the three components of the realism promoted by Grigorescu: it means to represent people, their medium, to engage with their psychology and to have credibility (to be adequate to the historical realities).

By exploring the city and its surroundings, Grigorescu and Dumitriu freeze the images in a kind of purgatory: they are simultaneously documents, witnesses to everyday life in a period at the crossroads, traces of the roads along which the artists get lost in their attempt to understand, but also symbolic devices, vehicles for ideas, which are waiting to be exposed and commented on. These photographs are the fruit of conversations “about poverty, squalor, simplicity, non-avoir, their relationship with the future, with revolution, with morals and with the exemplary.”[2] They configure the pages of an atlas of the Real—a diary in images—free of the constraints of artistic life, conceived in order to explain the sources of a present reality and to bring to the surface or rectify (if possible) the outbursts of history.

Partly motivated by the recent exhibition at the MSUM Ljubljana – Art at Work, At the Crossroads Between Utopianism and (In)Dependence, which is based on the widely known collection Arteast 2000+, this paper reflects upon changes in the concept of artistic work since the transition from socialism to neoliberalism. The protagonists of the paper are art and labor, often seen in a bipolar way, as immortal enemies or enduring lovers. In an attempt to bypass the usual opposition between the ‘emancipation through work’ and the ‘emancipation from work’, this paper addresses the blurred contexts of artistic work within the deregulated labor system in the East-South. The paradox of art as work considers changes in the understanding of artistic work that were already signalized in conceptual art in the sixties, especially in its playful treatment of workers’ norms, temporal productivity, and refusal of classical art canons or forms. This extended, neo-avantgarde redefinition of artistic work introduced the notions of indolence, daydreaming, and idleness, mocking the regular work and its bureaucratic procedures where the enjoyment disappears. It seems that today, in the age of late post-Fordism, the former utopianism of artists & collectives is replaced by incessant production and consumption, with the blurred distinction between paid and non-paid labor, working and free time, where everybody becomes fully employed in self-management and self-administration, with supposedly individual responsibility for her/his own failure. In the words of Bojana Kunst, project-based work ...submits the creative process to an administrative context. The question is not only how to fight the project but how to reconnect the creative process and the temporality policy. Furthermore, which post-conceptual or post-artistic (Kuba Szreder) practices are at disposal, that admit being burdened by neoliberal imperatives of competition and hyper-production but also ridicule the new libidinal economy? What kind of working ethos do such practices predispose in order to build more horizontal connections and rethink the legislation and bureaucratization that lies behind the transformation of the concept of artistic work? And finally, how does the museum work with poverty as a means and a problem in the art and of the artists?

In my paper, I want to investigate the documental status of artworks constituting the “aesthetic of administration” in the conceptual art of the 1970s. By using Hungarian neo-avant-garde practice as a case study I want to emphasize the engagement in the institutional order of social space that blurs the binary division between official and unofficial practice, autonomy, and heteronomy of art, offering the collective administration in opposition to state bureaucracy criticized by Marx. I draw my research upon the notion of “documentality” introduced by Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris and the aesthetics of politics defined by Jacques Rancière. In his theory of social ontology, Ferraris suggests that social order is a result of the work of social objects, which have the status of documents. Recordings and inscriptions in the form of documents create and change the social order, hence they possess the performative capacity and give the base for the institutional realm. I meet Ferraris's concept of social ontology with Jacques Ranciere's aesthetic of politics. The French philosopher introduced the notion of “distribution of the sensible” which consists of the constitution of the sensible experience of the common world and deciding who is able to share this experience. The establishment of what is common and who has the right to be an active subject within the social order is conditioned and maintained by the performative work of documents, confirming Marx’s vision of administration relations as dynamic. It seems that Hungarian artists in the 70s were particularly interested in administrative language, filling in forms, creating their hierarchies and institutions, making stamps, and writing reports in the moment of recognition of the documental nature of modernity. By analyzing Appeal Art (Péter Legéndy), stamping (Endre Tót), the exhibition EVERYBODY WITH ANYBODY (1982), and Artpool as an experimental documental production, I want to stress the collective and administrational status of those works and investigate how they perform the social order through the alternative ways of archiving and exhibiting.

Chair: Magdalena Radomska

Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, Franz Kafka's short story, discussed by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, functions as one of the examples for their concept of facialization (visagéité). The authors introduced the term to show that the human face is the result of the action of an anonymous power apparatus. Two irresistible ping-pong balls invade the private space of the protagonist's apartment. The literary portrait of Blumfeld is a figure of the conflict between an organism and an anonymous organization. In his recent book Face and Mask: A Double History, Hans Belting develops the idea of the face as the stage and the mask as the triumph of death over the multiplicity of facial expressions. The paper will discuss the semiotics of the face and mask based on the confrontations of the two parallel artistic oeuvres. The first, under the title Ping-poems, was introduced by the Brazilian poet and visual artist Lenora de Barros in the 1970s and further elaborated in the 1990s and 2000s. Being a naughty follower of a strong and mainly male-represented lineage of concrete poetry, she uses unorthodox performative explorations of language in its manifestations - haptic, visual, sonic, and spatial (verbi-voco-visual).

The second was founded by the Slovak conceptual artist Július Koller when in March 1970, he organized the action environment JK Ping-Pong Club - an exhibition that included a single object, a ping-pong table. In 1974, Július Koller participated in the Prospectiva 74 exhibition in Brazil. Cristina Freire characterized Koller's text cards sent to Sao Paulo as communication devices that would put distant places into contact, articulate microcosms and macrocosms, imaginary repertories and everyday situations, games, and fiction. According to Freire, in Koller's card-texts, the artistic and linguistic operation is presented as a representation space involving subject and culture, organism (individual), and organization (social). The hypothesis proposed by Clemente Padín to verify that the sign of the language of the action communicates the realization at the same time that it performs the communication would work for de Barros and Koller. Both artists employ the photographic image of the face distorted by fragile celluloid ping-pong balls. As the starting point for considering their artistic attitudes towards social reality, I will introduce the notion of "politics of language games." The transition between portrait and mask in their performative works is accompanied by another change: becoming alien. The isolated and externalized signs of language attached to the face perform it not as a portrait but as a mask. By analyzing their work as the self-image, I will highlight the communicative and signaling aspects of language games and address the questions of to whom the mask speaks, whom it represents, and where it turns the gaze away of the onlookers. Developed over decades, de Barros and Koller's unfolding rhizomes of pictorial worlds propose concrete practices of decolonization by radically opening up the subject to language games.

Teresa Murak is one of the most important precursors of performance art, land art, and feminist art in Poland. Since the 1970s, she has worked with the landscape using natural materials such as seeds, sourdough bread starter, clay, and river mud. Current art historical interpretations have so far positioned her works as a spiritual and compassionate reflection on the life cycles of nature. However, in my paper, I want to argue that her works might be also seen as an artistic articulation of the postcolonial status of land and earth in Poland marked by centuries-long histories of exploitation linked to the serfdom economy between the XVI and the XIX century. As argued by scholars such as Jan Sowa, Michał Rauszer, and Peter Kolchin, the phenomena of serfdom in Eastern Europe was in many ways analogous to Atlantic slavery and might be considered a form of internal colonization. Such a perspective radically alters our perception of land in the region opening it up to postcolonial/decolonial interpretations and discourses. Departing from these considerations, I will outline a new interpretation of Murak’s artistic practice as an articulation of the afterlives of serfdom and the histories of class and gender subordination in the region. In my paper, I will also reflect on how this perspective might shift our understanding of the genealogies of land art in Eastern Europe and position it in parallel to similar artistic experiences in the Global South. To this end, I will compare Murak’s works to the practice of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta: both artists strove to develop a decolonial language that would address the histories of violent colonial exploitation, racialization, and capitalist modernity as experienced in the global peripheries.

Chair: Katarzyna Cytlak

Chair: Andrea Bátorová

In the 1970s, only five exhibitions of the art of the Global South were organized by the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions, the largest state gallery of contemporary art of the Polish People’s Republic, which used to present approximately twenty exhibitions per year in Warsaw. The Central Bureau’s program was to mirror, e.g., the official political geographies of socialist cultural diplomacy. The five exhibitions mentioned above include three shows of Cuban art (Cuban Painting and Graphic Art, 1976; Contemporary Cuban Painting, 1979; René Portocarrero’s Carnivals, 1979), the solo show of a Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas (1976), and the Indian Contemporary Art from the Collection of the National Gallery of Contemporary Art in New Delhi (1978/1979). Such a small number of official art exhibitions from the so-called Global South in Warsaw seems paradoxical since Polish artists regularly took part in the São Paulo Biennial (founded in 1951). In 1968, Lawrence Alloway, a renowned English art critic, and curator based in the United States from 1961, criticized the São Paulo Biennial as an exhibition organized in “an abandoned factory,” a “kind of fiction with extensions into reality in the form of catalogs and prizes” (see: Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale 1895–1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl, London: Faber and Faber, 1968). The paper aims to outline the geography of art exhibitions organized by the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in the 1970s as a political background for the history of East-European and Global South art connections seen as an alternative to East-European and Global North art geography. The paper’s main inspiration comes from Piotr Piotrowski’s last and unfinished book (published in 2018), where he searches for a possibility to confront “East-European art peripheries” with “post-colonial theories.”

In 1968, New Delhi hosted India’s first Triennale of World Contemporary Art. Spearheaded by the cultural critic Mulk Raj Anand alongside intellectuals and cultural critics from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, it collocated India on an expanding world stage of biennales and triennales. Dreamed as an exhibitionary site with pedagogical and political possibility, the exhibition promised the inscription of Modern arts onto India’s capital and into broader international circuits of art. The Triennale was organized by India’s National Academy of Art, the Lalit Kala Akademi, then chaired by Anand, and featured more than six hundred works from thirty-one countries. Though ultimately failing to garner adequate critical support in subsequent iterations, this little-discussed Triennale’s format and creation sheds light on the aspirations of founders keen on the development of culture through the arts.

I orient my analysis to the ways that the project sought to bring Modern art to a larger Indian public, and conceived of new cultural relations between art and the nation, acknowledging that discourses in art and design served as a staging ground for desires in intra- and inter-cultural communication. In the Global South, it held the promise of ‘cultural self-comprehension’ for select advocates of national self-determination during a period of rapid decolonization. This period not only witnessed the tug-of-war between the USSR and NATO nations for influence in the ‘developing world,’ but also the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement to counter these two polarities of the Cold War. Furthermore, art and design dovetailed with these larger geopolitical movements by promising anticolonialists commensurability on an international stage with fraught power differentials.

The first of what has become a commonplace exhibitionary format, the Triennale provides rare insight into new conceptual intersections of arts as cultural pedagogy in India and arts as intercultural communication beyond the nation –- two decades into the great experiment of nation-making. Enabled by the arrival of new diplomatic corridors and cultural alliances in the 1960s, a time of precarity for India as it recalibrated its international alliances, it indexed a particular Cold War–- era entanglement of shifting translocal artistic affiliations and cultural diplomacy, and the promise offered by new conceptions of art as a vehicle for intercultural communication.

Addressing:

1. Collective-based thinking and networking both in and between Eastern Europe and Global South

2. Between political engagement and political disaffection: different ways of inscribing the viewer in the works of artists from both regions - from political involvement to contemplation of the autonomy of art

Chair: Dávid Fehér

In 1977, Colombian artist Jonier Marin organized Videopost, a collective video project, at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP). This institution had recently acquired its video equipment, and Marin took advantage of it, with the help of the museum staff, to record short 5-minute fragments according to the instructions received from artists from different locations.

The project was developed through postal contacts, using the connective and activist methodologies of mail-art: horizontality, interdisciplinarity, contextuality, spontaneity, connectivity, poor materiality, connection art-life, and politicization. Participants included Marin himself, the Venezuelan Itamar Martínez, the French Jean Kuhl, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Alain Snyers and Grupo UNTEL, the Uruguayans Óscar Caraballo and Clemente Padín, the Italians Antonio Ferro and Romano Pelli, the Japanese Mukata Takamura, the Argentinean Edgardo Antonio Vigo, the Belgian Eduard Bal, the German Klaus Groh, the Palestinian, resident in France, Rachid Koraichi, and the Polish Pawel Petasz.

The proposals were very varied, including visual and sound poetry, critiques of the media – especially television –, actions in the public space, and experiences with the specificities of the videographic medium. But in all of them, the same left-wing, libertarian political sensibility could be appreciated. Over the long distances that separated the participants' places of origin, the ideologization of artistic production took the form of international solidarity, expressed through the possibilities offered by communication networks and audiovisual technologies.

This presentation introduces the Videopost project, focusing on some of the most relevant proposals. The aim is to highlight how the poor media that had circulated internationally through envelopes and mailings was now being introduced into the electronic audiovisual sphere. However, with this transfer, the artworks did not lose their activist and propositional characteristics, which served as a link for a critique of the oppressive conditions shared by disparate regions such as Latin America or Eastern Europe. But these conditions of oppression were also felt by agents in wealthy countries such as France or Germany who were aware of the imbalances of power in different parts of the world and understood them to be linked to the hegemony of the North and the West.

The contribution maps the network of mail-art contacts, which were initiated by Jiří Valoch at the end of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, with the authors and artistic organizations of Latin America and South Africa (Clemente Padín and the OVUM magazine, Michael McNamara and the Ophir magazine, Jorge Glusberg and the CAYC organization). The author of the contribution argues that the mail-art activities between Communist Czechoslovakia and the countries of the global South represented a certain kind of artistic, Marxist-oriented practice. Its aim was not to contribute to the production of original visual commodities but to form ideas and reinforce a program leading to a potential transformation of artistic creation and its social position.

The beginnings of this international communication are on the one hand linked with Valoch's engagement in the global movement of concrete poetry, and on the other stem from organizing the Computer Graphik exhibition, which was curated by the 21-year-old Jiří Valoch in the atmosphere of the Prague Spring in 1968 in the Brno's House of Arts, and which was the first exhibition of the computer graphics in the Central and Eastern Europe. The Computer Graphik exhibition sustained the thoughts presented in an internationally renowned publication Civilizace na rozcestí, in which the authorial collective around philosopher Radovan Richta advocated the rise of the “scientific and technical society” from the Marxist perspective.

For Jiří Valoch, similarly to conceptualism and concrete poetry, the computer graphics represented a financially available art form independent on the walls of museums, freed from the aura of an original and the exceptionality of an author in favor of common sharing and more fair redistribution of intellectual welfare. Via the Computer Graphik exhibition, he gained international recognition of the New Tendency artists and it initiated his friendships with authors of the Global South.

Chair: Pavlína Morganová

I would like to go discuss several episodes of the historic encounters between the Baltic countries and the Global South pertaining to exhibition histories, knowledge production, and artist mobility. Starting from Voldemārs Matvejs (Vladimir Markov; 1877–1914), Latvian artist and art theorist, whose essay “Negro Art” [author’s use], published in 1919, five years after the author’s death, – a pioneering investigation into the aesthetics of African works of art that was later presented in Senegal, 1966 at the World Festival of Black Arts, also known as FESMAN, by the Soviet correspondents; to – Indian, Congo and Angolan exhibitions that took place in the Latvian art museum “Riga Bourse” between the 1960s to 1980s, as well as Lithuanian photo-journalists and designers working in African countries, the narratives brought forward from the Baltic countries Latvia and Lithuania are smaller in scale than the larger Soviet exchanges, or former Yugoslavia’s non-aligned histories, however, as often the side-stories to a larger political history can offer an emancipatory look bypassing the Moscow and better-known centers and thinking of an actual solidarity for the future.

Since the Baltic countries were part of the Soviet Union, most of their artistic exchanges with the countries of the Global South had to take place in a centralized way through Moscow. Keeping this in mind, I will first look at the exhibition history of the art museum “Riga Bourse” which used to be called the Museum of Foreign Art during Soviet times, and was hosting exhibitions both from the Western countries, and the countries of the Global South. Because of the Soviet support of governments across the Global South, active cultural diplomatic ties were commonplace, which also manifested in Riga, where between the 1960s-1980s three art exhibitions from India, and one from Congo and Angola took place. These representations of art varied from ethnographic to contemporary art exhibitions with such Indian modernists like printmaker Krishna Reddy (1925-2018) and Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar (1911–1996) taking part. The artists however didn’t travel to Latvia limiting the encounter to their work instead of personal exchange. At the same time, Lithuanian photojournalist Marius Baranauskas, traveled to Morocco, Angola, India and other places, bringing back documentary material, and Lithuanian designer Tadas Baginskas worked in Yemen and Lygija Marija Kislauskaitė-Stapulionienė – in Guinea.

With these transmissions in mind, we can think of how different internationalisms were being instituted on small scale, as well as individual pathways articulated. Analyzing the reception and power dynamics within those encounters seems to be key here.

In 1971 the traveling Contemporary Egyptian Art exhibition took place at Prague City Gallery. Organized by the Alexandria Museum of Fine Arts – which since 1955 hosted the prestigious Biennale for Mediterranean Countries, the exhibition featured works of thirty Egyptian artists. Mahmoud Saïd (1897–1964), considered the founder of modern Egyptian painting, was represented by three paintings including the large-scale Bathers, while the first page of the catalogue featured The Guardian of Life by Mohammed Hamed Owais (1919–2011), the co-founder of the Group of Modern Art and the foremost representative of Social Realism reflecting modernization of Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser and the life of Egyptian peasants and working class. Another artist tackling social issues of contemporary Egypt was Mariam Abdel Aleem (1930–2010), one of the forerunners of the second generation of Modern Egyptian artists, while abstraction was represented by Mahmoud Helmy (1916–1997) and the young painter Mahmoud Abdullah (1936–2002). The exhibition thus provided the Czech public with a broad spectrum of formal and thematic positions of Egyptian postwar modernism. Although the exhibition traveled to Prague from the GDR, additional works were selected for the exhibition in Prague in particular and shipped separately.

The exhibition took place in a new political climate for both Egypt and Czechoslovakia which have since the 1950s been important economic partners. In socialist Czechoslovakia, the period of the so-called normalization was launched following the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, when in April 1969 reformist Alexander Dubček was replaced by pro-Soviet Gustáv Husák as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In non-Aligned Egypt, Anwar Sadat was elected as President of Egypt in October 1970, following the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser whose vision of Egypt as a rising regional if not world power was shaken by the defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967. Sadat gradually reversed Nasser’s domestic and foreign policy, switching Egypt’s Cold War allegiance from the Soviet Union to the United States and expelling Soviet advisors in 1972, and liberalized the economy while suppressing both religious and secular opposition. In arts and culture this meant turning away from the dominant position of social realism towards abstract expressionism and abstraction more generally as well as integrating of Islamic calligraphy and other influences of cultural heritage into modern art.

I will present the 1971 exhibition as a case study of the quickly changing political realities from the late 1960s to the early 1970s in both Egypt and Czechoslovakia. Contemporary Egyptian Art was, perhaps surprisingly, one of the last exhibitions in Czechoslovakia which displayed a variety of modernist and contemporary approaches to art, which continued in the 1970s Czechoslovakia only underground. Rather than opening new forms of exchange between Egypt and Czechoslovakia, however, the exhibition was thus rather a premature swan song of cultural relations between the two countries, although the economic relations continued pragmatic until the late 1980s.

Crystalism was a conceptual art movement that appeared in Sudan in the second half of the 1970s, proposing a new vision of materialism and the cosmos modeled upon the properties of a crystal seen as a passage between the finite and the infinite, while recovering sensuous perception. Crystalism manifesto appeared in Khartoum’s al-Ayyam newspaper in 1976 and was signed by artists such as Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq or Muhammad Hamid Shaddad. My presentation seeks to map out transversal (in the sense of Felix Guattari) resonances between Crystalist conceptualism and a strand of neo-avant-garde practices in the Polish People's Republic of Poland in the 1970s termed by Łukasz Ronduda "sensuous-corporeal conceptualism" represented by Natalia LL and Marek Konieczny. I am going to argue that both artistic modalities constituted in fact reformist interventions into their respective state socialisms while defying West-centric assumptions about what conceptualism proper should be like. Sudanese Crystalism resonates with Marek Konieczny's occult conceptualist practices; his Think Crazy idiom (1974-2022) and its performative manifestations throughout the 1970s are in many ways parallel to Shaddad's melting ice block performances (1974-8). Similarly, Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq's spiritual art practices find commonalities with Natalia LL, while the conceptualization of art as crystal within the Crystalist Manifesto resonates with Jerzy Ludwiński's molecular and geo-aesthetic take on art, both can be seen as forerunners of environmental art history.