Decolonisation and Eastern European Art

Decolonisation and Eastern European Art

Dorota Jagoda Michalska, University of Oxford, dorota.michalska@bnc.ox.ac.uk

Marta Zboralska, UCL/University of Essex, marta.zboralska.09@ucl.ac.uk

This session will consider the place of Central and Eastern Europe within current debates about decolonisation. Historically, art from the region has occupied an ambivalent position vis-à-vis the Western canon. This ambivalence has long been used to the area’s advantage, enabling scholars to claim critical distance from dominant methodologies, narratives and epistemologies. However, the visual cultures of Eastern Europe are not immune from the material and historical legacies of colonialism – especially in terms of the region’s own imperial projects and fantasies, still reflected in the lack of counter-narratives to homogenous national histories. As part of the broader decolonisation project, how should we reorient our position as historians of Eastern European art and rethink the status of the subjects and objects of our study?

We are interested in exploring different approaches towards writing, teaching, curating and researching Eastern European art histories from a decolonial perspective. We therefore invite proposals concerning both wider debates and narrow case studies, and relating to all art-historical periods. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the visual and material cultures of Eastern Europe and: race and racialisation; narratives of mono- and multiculturalism; socialist definitions of ‘modernity’; museology and museum collections; anti-imperialism and networks of socialist solidarity (e.g. artistic exchanges between the “Second World” and countries of the Non-Aligned Movement); postcolonial epistemologies (e.g. Roma culture and identity); anti-capitalist approaches towards knowledge production; decolonial perspectives on ethnographic and archaeological collections from the region.

Speakers & Abstracts

Yugoslavia’s Politically Engaged Art: Nonaligned Modernism in Images of Yugoslav World War Two Antifascist Resistance

Bojana Videkanic (University of Waterloo)

In 1975 Yugoslav Museum of People’s Revolution in Belgrade was tasked to organize and send a travelling exhibition to its nonaligned revolutionary partner Algeria. Thematically depicting Yugoslav people’s liberation struggle (Narodnooslobodilačka borba) in WWII against German, Italian, Hungarian and other fascists, the exhibition is an example of Yugoslavia’s participation in post-war anti-imperialist cultural work. As one of the original nonaligned member states, and a country which Yugoslavia supported during its anticolonial revolution, Alegria represented an important ally. The exhibition entitled The People’s War of Liberation in the Work of Yugoslav Artists was an example of how politically engaged art about the Yugoslav Partisan struggle was used to build political and cultural ties and solidarity. It was, of course, no coincidence that art depicting Partisan struggle against a much stronger fascist, imperialist enemy reinforced the political discourse behind Algeria’s own war of independence against colonialism. Paralleling Yugoslavia’s assistance to Algeria in weapons, political support, and material aid, this exhibition gave moral backing to the anti-colonial war. It also provided an ideological structure which historicised Algerian and Yugoslav wars in the context of imperial predilections of Western empires, both French and German, therefore connecting North Africa and the Balkans through a shared history of resistance. The exhibition is only one example of multiple ways in which socialist Yugoslavia collaborated with its NAM allies from Africa and other continents on a new vision of an alternative international culture. This paper will analyze the exhibition in the context of art historian Sanjukta Sunderason calls shared “visual scapes of internationalism,” and which I called “nonaligned modernism” to point to embodied multiple, diverse, and political modernist visions enabled through Non-Aligned Movement’s cultural networks and are a proof of the cultural agency of ‘small nations’ which incorporated and resisted various hegemonic cultural influences, fashioning their own political, utopian, visions of the future. Moreover, it also points to a shared socialist anti-colonial cultural space which grew out of the post-war liberatory political projects among NAM member states.

1994–2000: Slovak Return to Europe via the Museum of Non-European Cultures

Rado Ištok (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)

In 1997, the Museum of Non-European Cultures opened in Bratislava for a period of three years. Its display consisted of African artworks and artifacts from the collection of Miroslav Petrovský, a Slo-vak émigré to Australia, acquired by the Slovak National Museum in years 1994–1996 – i.e. shortly after the separation of Czechoslovakia in 1993. In my paper, I will address the brief existence of the Museum of Non-European Cultures in Slovakia and its role in the context of the post-1989 political projects of the return of post-Socialist countries to Europe, as well as the historically delayed emer-gence of Slovakia as an independent nation state. Drawing on the work of the political scientist Pavel Barša, I propose to view the establishment of the museum through the lens of the changing relationship of East-Central Europe to the Global South, when the globally oriented Socialist for-eign policy was substituted by the 1990s Eurocentrism. This return to European values implied vari-ous manifestations of coloniality, materialised not least in the ethnographic and ‘world culture’ mu-seums in Western European metropolises dating back to the 19th century, which the museum in Bratislava aimed to emulate in a newcomer manner. While the contemporary archeologist Dan Hicks proposes the position of Euro-pessimism in which the knowledge that Europeans can produce about ethnographic collections is primarily the knowledge of European colonialism, I am adopting this position for the context of Slovakia for a new understanding of the country’s independence and post-1989 transformation.

Colonial Complex in Interwar Poland: Visual Construction of Racial Difference in 1930’s Cinema

Łukasz Zaremba (Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw)

Dominant ways of engaging with interwar discussions about Polish overseas colonies have sought to either dismiss it as “pure fantasy” or affirm as “no mere fantasy” but a feasible political plan. Instead, this project interrogates “colonial fantasies”, examining them as narrative and visual frameworks, manifestations of ideas and desires about the conquest and seizure of oversea lands and the subjugation of peoples. My main analytical category is the “colonial complex”, understood (1) as a multimedia, multigenre assortment of practices and representations; (2) an inferiority complex of peripheral cultures, resulting in a desire to catch up and prove oneself a member of the global center; (3) the psychoanalytic definition of complex: an “organized group of ideas and memories of great affective force which are either partly or totally unconscious”. Hence, the project aims to examine the Polish colonial imaginary as a part of a supranational ideology, but also to identify the specific uses of colonialism embraced by social groups comprising the society of the Second Polish Republic.

Using the framework of the colonial complex, in the presentation I will investigate the development of mechanisms and tools of constructing racial difference in Polish 1930’s cinema. Whereas discussions about Polish colonial themes focus mainly on literature, it was visual media – illustrated magazines, photographic reportages, and cinema – which were crucial in creating a popular colonial imagination. Films like Black Pearl (dir. M. Waszyński,1934) not only employed colonial-themed stories, but also sought to create a new visual language of presenting racial difference to Polish audiences.

Infrastructural Worldings of Russian Settler Colonialism

Sasha Shestakova (Ruhr University Bochum)

In my paper, I address the temporal dimension of Russian settler colonialism by looking at the Soviet paintings and objects of material culture ("decorative art"), portraying and glorifying the infrastructures of colonial conquest. Russian settler colonialism is the combination of racialized "segregation, divestment, surveillance, and criminalization" and "biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora, and fauna within the "domestic" borders of the imperial nation" (Tuck, Yang, 2012: 43), dating back to the late 19th century (Morrison, 2016), but accelerating in the Soviet period.

Art sustained the manipulation of time through what I describe as "infrastructural worldings": the material-discursive creation of the version of reality, which centralized colonial infrastructures. Focusing on ROSISO – one of the significant collections of the Soviet art in Russia – I look at the way art created an "imperial temporality," which "functions by imposing a single, linear progression of time, and associates different groups of the governed with different moments along its course" (Azoulay, 2019: 142). I understand worldings as material-discursive practices, which make some worlds, solutions, and political decisions hold together and seem true, while others are rendered unimaginable and unthinkable (Lepawsky, 2018: 12)

By looking at the Soviet settler colonial worldings, I also address the ones of the Russian settler colonialism. Turning back to the images of the Soviet settler colonial conquest, the Russian state uses them as evidence of the former glory, which needs to be recreated in the here and now. Addressing this temporal entanglement is vital for decolonization, which I see as a process of both land and temporal reclamation.

Total Eclipse: Aleksandr Rodchenko, Brazil, and the Imperialist Imagination of Nonobjective Painting

Max Boersma (Harvard University)

In 1858, the French astronomer Emmanuel Liais undertook a self-initiated expedition to Paranaguá, Brazil to observe a total solar eclipse; the prized result of his endeavor was a precisely rendered study of the event, which circulated widely as a woodcut and wood engraving. Halfway around the world, one such reproduction found its way into the Moscow studio of Aleksandr Rodchenko, serving as a key impetus for the best known of his nonobjective Black on Black paintings, Composition no. 64 (1918). Forty years later, Rodchenko’s painting made its own way “back” to Brazil, again via reproduction. Appearing prominently in a 1959 article by art critic Ferreira Gullar, the artist’s work was now seen solely within the discourse of modernist art.

This one-hundred-year loop frames my investigation into Rodchenko’s Black on Black series. Previously unrecognized, the painter’s concrete engagement with Liais’s eclipse illustration, I argue, demonstrates how the scientific image served as a technical and epistemic model for his nonobjective painting, while prompting a reassessment of period tropes of laboratory experimentation, technical innovation, and formal discovery. Toward this end, my talk carefully examines the alignments and misalignments between the endeavors of Liais and Rodchenko, lingering on the artist’s enthusiasm for scientific expeditions, his personal identification with Christopher Columbus, and his fantasies of exploring terra nullius (“land belonging to no one”). Learning from theorists of decolonization, this paper ultimately seeks to outline the imperial imagination of nonobjective painting, charting its distinctive entanglements with positivist science, spatial conquest, and hierarchical networks of Western knowledge production.

Władysław Hasior (1928-1999): Decolonialism, Negritude and Global Surrealism

Dorota Jagoda Michalska (Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford)

What role can decolonialisation play in the context of Eastern European art histories? How can the debate around decolonial theory and practice be translated into the context of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc? Departing from this set of broader questions, I want to focus on the works by Polish artist Władysław Hasior (1928-1999) for whom folk culture was an antidote to the colonising effects of both Western and Eastern modern discourses and imperial practices. Through his idiosyncratic, surrealist objects that weave a network of decolonial solidarities, Hasior sought to tell the story of a neglected, global periphery, one that bypasses the principles of the neo-avantgarde movement as well as those of Soviet-inspired socialist realism.

In order, to fully bring into light the decolonial potential of Hasior’s practice, I argue that his works might be situated in parallel to the Negritude movement as conceptualized by Aimé Césaire, Léopolod Senghor and Léon Damas in interwar Paris. Taking surrealism as their starting point, they aimed to create an artistic and political decolonial movement that would depart from such notions as rationality, linearity and progress which informed both Capitalist and Marxist colonial modernities. By positioning Hasior within the framework of Negritude, one can fully shed light on how surrealism provided the grounds for a decolonial language able to articulate the idiomatic identity and struggles of subaltern communities located on the intersection of race and class. To further prove this point, I will compare Hasior’s surrealistic objects and assemblages with works of Senegalese artists such as Issa Samb (1945-2017) and Moustapha Dimé (1952-1998) whose artistic practices remain in a complex relationship to the concept of Negritude, decoloniality and indigenous identities.