In this two-day conference, we are interested in instances of instruction and what we call a ‘didactic impulse’ – understood here as forms of instruction that aim at dialogue and conversation rather than mere indoctrination – in post-war and contemporary Eastern European art. Instruction and the didactic have been productive, if often unacknowledged and under-theorised, categories in post-formalist art production from the late 1960s and 1970s that have found expression, among other things, in an increased interest in lecturing and other forms of teaching and demonstration, and in the use of didacticism as an artistic technique.

If this development extended to Eastern Europe, what are the specific characteristics of such an ‘instructional turn’ in this region, both during state socialism and in more recent times? How, moreover, can we assess art-related practices such as curating and artistic research in Eastern Europe from this perspective?

The issues we aim to address during the conference include: art instruction as a form of art production; teaching and lecturing as art; the didactic aesthetics of socialist realism; instruction as demonstration and performance; instruction and didactic ‘showing’ in conceptual art; didacticism and aesthetic autonomy in artistic research; instruction as a form of social critique; (art) demonstration and revolutionary politics; didacticism, critical pedagogies, and the politics of affect; the didactic as part of socialist curatorship and exhibitions; ecological aspects of art as instruction; and instruction and/as anti-modernism.