The Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art (ICMA), in collaboration with the Art History & Theory specialisation within the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design at the George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași (UNAGE Iași), is pleased to announce a public lecture by Matteo Bertelé, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Entitled Mapping Geographies Through International Art Exhibitions in Divided Europe, the lecture will take place on Wednesday, 19 November 2025, from 10.00 am to 2.00 pm, in Hall A.0.1, Building A, Faculty of Visual Arts and Design, UNAGE Iași. The event is open to students, academic staff and the general public, and will be held in English.

The lecture focuses on “large-scale perennial exhibitions of contemporary art” (The Biennial Reader, 2010) held in the second half of the Fifties in divided Europe. At the height of the Cold War, 1955 marked a pivotal date in the history of Biennials, as the launching year of a series of initiatives that inaugurated on world scale a wave of biennialization (Green, Gardner, Biennials, Triennials and documenta, 2016, 83).

In Western Europe, ten years after the end of WWII, two defeated nations deployed exhibitions as tools for reconciliation and integration. That happened in 1955 in Kassel with the establishment of documenta as an attempt to reinstate German culture into the international art community; and in 1956 at the Venice Biennale (already at its fifth post-war edition), with the participation of an unprecedented number of nations. These included countries from the socialist East, which by then were undergoing changes in the wake of the so-called cultural Thaw. On the one hand, Poland presented in its pavilion modernist artists to emancipate its national culture from Soviet socialist realism by embracing West-European mainstream art. On the other, the USSR hosted initiatives such as the first (and only) Exhibition of Socialist Countries (1958), to prove its internationalist aura. With the foundation of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts in 1955, Yugoslavia opened its third way in exhibition matters promoting an ideologically non-aligned initiative.

Building on such examples, the lecture intends to investigate the policies practiced by both established and new international art exhibitions, by underscoring their mapping of new art geographies as means of integration or emancipation, inclusion or exclusion. It will be finally highlighted to what extent such initiatives adopted different scales (local, regional, national, international, internationalist, supranational) in addressing and defining new audiences in Cold War divided Europe.

Matteo Bertelé is Associate Professor in Contemporary Art History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is currently a project researcher at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and an associate scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. He serves as Executive Director of the Summer School “Contemporary art and curatorship: from documenta to the Biennale” and as Director of the contemporary art section of the academic journal Venezia Arti. His research interests encompass Russian, Soviet and socialist art and visual cultures, exhibition studies and the cultural dimensions of the Cold War.

The lecture is organized within the framework of the project International Promotion of UNAGE Iași in the Digital Environment and the Consolidation of European Values in Arts Education through Collaboration with Partner Institutions, funded by the Romanian National Commission for the Financing of Higher Education (CNFIS) through the Institutional Development Fund (FDI), under grant no. CNFIS-FDI-2025-0300.

Project Director: Professor Cristian Nae.