11–12.06.2023

Eduard Caudella Hall,
Balș House, UNAGE Iași

The Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art (ICMA), in collaboration with the Graduate Center for Literary Research at University of California Santa Barbara is organising on 11–12 June 2026, at the George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași, the international conference entitled Instruction and the Didactic Impulse in Postwar Art from Eastern Europe.

In this two-day conference we are interested in instances of instruction and what we call a “didactic impulse” — understood as instruction that aims for dialogue and conversation rather than indoctrination — in postwar and contemporary Eastern European art. Instruction and the didactic have been productive, if unacknowledged and under-theorized, categories in post-formalist art production from the late 1960s and ‘70s and they have found expression, among other things, in an increased interest in lecturing and other forms of teaching, demonstration, and didacticism as artistic techniques.

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? And how can we asses practices such as curating and artistic research in Eastern Europe from such a perspective? Related issues we want 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; instruction and/as anti-modernism.

Conference organized by Cristian Nae (George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași) and Sven Spieker (University of California, Santa Barbara).

Thursday 11 June

09:30 — 10:00

Wellcome and Introduction

Cristian Nae is Professor of Aesthetics and Contemporary Art at the George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași, Romania, where he also leads the Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2023). He has received research grants and fellowships from multiple institutions, including the CAA-Getty International Program, the Getty Foundation, and the New Europe College Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest. He was senior adviser on a project focused on periodisation in the history of art in East-Central Europe, supported by the Getty Foundation as part of its Connecting Art Histories initiative (2019–2022). His recent studies have been published in journals such as Third Text and ARTMargins (MIT Press), and included in volumes such as Curating Socialism (University of Toronto Press, 2026), Globalizing the Avant-Garde (De Gruyter/Brill, 2025), Plural and Multiple Geographies of Modern and Contemporary Art in East-Central Europe (Routledge, 2024), State Construction and Art in East Central Europe 1918–2018 (Routledge, 2022), Art History in a Global Context: Methods, Themes and Approaches (Wiley Blackwell, 2020), Realisms of the Avant-Garde (De Gruyter, 2020), and Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Event-based Art in Late Socialist Europe (Routledge, 2018). He edited (In)Visible Frames. Rhetorics and Experimental Exhibition Practices in Romania 1965–1989 (Idea, 2019) and co-edited Contemporary Romanian Art 2010–2020 (Hatje Cantz, 2020).

10:00 — 11:00

Keynote Lecture I

Sven Spieker is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary art and literature, with an emphasis on Eastern and Central Europe; avant-garde studies, especially Russian; and intersections between critical theory and modern art/literature. He held numerous fellowship positions, notably from Stanford University. His books include Art as Demonstration. A Revolutionary Recasting of Knowledge (The MIT Press, 2024) and The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press, 2008).  He edited the volume Destruction in the series Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press/Whitechapel, 2017) and more recently co-edited the publication Curating Socialism. A Handbook of International Art Exhibitions 1947–1989 (University of Toronto Press, 2026). Spieker is also the executive editor of ARTMargins and ARTMargins Online.

11:00 — 13:00

Panel I • Socialist Didacticism

Constanze Fritzsch is an Affiliated Researcher, Research Group Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual at the Max Plank Institute for Art History, Florence. She was a Fulbright Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 2023/2024. She holds a PhD from the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, having earned her MA in Art History from the University of Paris Nanterre and her Licence in Art History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She was a retired member of the ENS de Paris. She is a former member of the research project “Á chacun son reel” of the German Center for Art History in Paris, worked at the Dresden State Art Collections, and was part of a Getty Research Travelling Group. She was a research assistant at the Bauhaus University Weimar, and held teaching positions at the HfBK Dresden as well as at the Universities of Leipzig and Dresden.

Jonida Gashi is a senior researcher at the Centre for Art Studies, part of the Academy of Sciences of Albania. Her work sits at the intersection of cinema and the moving image on one side, and modern and contemporary art on the other. She is the author of the monograph Cinema on Trial: From the Newsreels of the Communist Show Trials to the Revolutionary Vigilance Films, published in 2025 by Pika pa sipërfaqe, which examines how Albania’s communist-era show trials shaped socialist realist visual culture. Gashi also serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Art Studies, published annually by the Academy of Sciences of Albania, and is among the founding members of the DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art, an initiative for critical and experimental artistic practice (https://debatikcenter.net/index).

Jasna Jaksić is a curator and art critic, working as a Head of the Library and Documentation and Information Department at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (MSU). She has been working on the digitization of MSU Archives and Library collections since 2009 while managing projects such as Digitizing Ideas: Archives of Conceptual and Neo-Avantgarde Art Practices (2010–12) and Performing the Museum (2014–16). Co-editor of a series of graphic novels dedicated to the artists from MSU collections as well as of the monograph New tendencies – 60 years later. Co-curator of the exhibitions To be Continued: Comics and Visual Culture in Croatia (2020) and Body and Territory: Art and Borders in Today’s Austria (2022, 2023), she is a member of the curatorial teams of the ongoing exhibitions Collection as a Verb and Realize! Resist! React! – Performance and politics in the post-Yugoslav context of the 1990.

Patryk Tomaszewski is a historian of art and visual culture and an Adjunct Instructor at Fordham University. He previously served as a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art and as an adjunct lecturer at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. His research focuses on twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe, particularly the relationship between cultural production, state institutions, and public reception in early communist Poland. His doctoral dissertation offered the first sustained study of state-sponsored exhibitions of art and visual culture in Poland under Stalinism (1945–1956). He is currently expanding this research through newly identified archival sources from Polish state and museum archives, with particular attention to audience response and the reception of Socialist Realism. Dr. Tomaszewski has presented and published on the Russian avant-garde, postwar art in Central and Eastern Europe, and the transnational artistic circulation between East and West after 1945. He holds a Ph.D. from the City University of New York–Graduate Center.

14:00 — 16:00

Panel II • Instruction as Form

Sándor Hornyik is an art historian and curator working for the Institute for Art History of the Research Center for the Humanities (ELTE). He has a PhD in art history (2005, Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest). His research concerns the history and theory of avant-garde and neo avant-garde art as well as the theoretical issues of contemporary art and visual culture studies. He published books on the neo-avant-garde reception of modern natural sciences (Avantgárd tudomány? [Avant-Garde Science?]) and on the intersections of iconology, visual studies and contemporary art (Idegenek egy bűnös városban[Aliens in a Sin City]). Between 2012 and 2014, he was the chief curator of MODEM (Museum of Modern Art Debrecen) where he curated several exhibitions dealing with socialist and post-socialist visual cultures. He also curated exhibitions in Maribor, in Riga, and in Paris. In 2018, he co-edited an English volume on the Hungarian art of the 1960-1970s (Doublespeak and Beyond: Art in Hungary, 1956-1980, Thames and Hudson, London). In 2021, he acquired the Doctor of Sciences title of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2025, he published a book based on his articles on contemporary art and art theory, entitled Sötét ikonológia: Művészettörténet a humanizmus korszaka után (Dark Iconology: Art History After the Age of Humanism).

Matthias Mendl studied Philosophy and Slavic Studies in Berlin, Moscow, and Zurich. In 2018, he published his PhD thesis about the intersection of contemporary art, literature, and activism in Russia entitled Reiner Aktivismus? : Politisierung von Literatur und Kunst im postsowjetischen Russland. Currently, he is a research assistant at Zurich University.

Karolina Majewska-Güde is a researcher, art historian and curator at the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw. Her research engages East Central European neoavant-gardes, feminist epistemologies, performance art, and contemporary processes of circulation, translation, and knowledge production through art-based research. Her work critically examines the legacies of state socialist cultures from gendered, transnational and infrastructural perspectives, with the aim of reconfiguring historical and contemporary understandings of artistic labour. She is an active member of several research and curatorial collectives that integrate performative, interpretative, and archival research, and that develop workshops and other discursive formats addressing questions of maintenance, historicization, and the activisation of feminist art and its archives. Her recent book Ewa Partum’s Artistic Practice: An Atlas of Continuity in Different Locations was published by Transcript in 2021.

Mădălina Brașoveanu is is Assistant Professor of Art History and Theory at the Department of Visual Arts, Faculty of Arts, University of Oradea. She researches and writes about art in Romania after 1945, with a focus on artistic micro-communities, conceptual art, archival and exhibition studies. She was recipient of research fellowships funded by Getty Foundation, Los Angeles and New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Studies in Bucharest, and she was a member in several collective research projects funded by CNCS-UEFISCDI. She contributed to several publications, among which: Artists&Agents. Performance Art and the Secret Services (2023); (In)Visible Frames. Rhetorics and experimental exhibition practices in Romanian art between 1965-1989 (2019). She recently published the book O singurătate destul de zgomotoasă. Practici artistice neconvenționale în Atelier 35 Oradea și gruparea MAMŰ din Târgu-Mureș, 1978-1989 [A Solitude Loud Enough: Unconventional Art Practices within Atelier 35 Oradea and the Group MAMŰ in Târgu-Mureș, 1978-1989], Idea Design & Print, Cluj, Editura Universitară „Ion Mincu”, București, 2022 and curatedthe exhibition: Relatări despre o singurătate zgomotoasă, MAGMA, Sfântu Gheorghe, and Salonul de Proiecte, Bucharest (2024).

Friday 12 June

10:00 — 12:00

Panel III • Instruction Without Didacticism

Silva Kalčić, PhD, works as the Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split. She graduated Art History at the University of Zagreb, and received her doctorate in architecture and urban planning from the Faculty of Architecture. She is currently the head of AICA Croatia. She was the editor of several journals and magazines, she has authored numerous publications and four books, including a university coursebook, and has received several awards, such as the City of Zagreb Award in 2009.

Zlatko Galić is an MA student of Art History at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, specializing in modern and contemporary art.

Jess Young is an academic researcher and cultural strategist whose work examines the role of visual culture in shaping forms of knowledge and understanding from the postwar period to the present. She holds an MA with Distinction from Courtauld Institute of Art, where she was supervised by Professor Klara Kemp-Welch and specialised in photographic practices and visual politics in Eastern Europe since 1968. She is currently preparing a PhD proposal examining historical strategies for producing media literacies in the region, with particular attention to the role of technology and the artist as educator. She is Co-Editor of Agents of Mediation: Perspectives on New Media and Lens-Based Practices in Eastern Europe Since 1968, an edited academic volume examining how images operate as mediators of information and knowledge.

Cristian Nae is professor of aesthetics and contemporary art at George Enescu National University of the Arts in Iasi, Romania, where he also leads the Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in the Arts. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara (2023). He has received research grants and fellowships from multiple agencies, including the CAA-Getty International Program; the Getty Foundation and the New Europe College Institute for Advanced Studies, Bucharest. He was senior advisor in a project focused on periodisation in the history of art in East-Central Europe supported by the Getty Foundation as part of its Connecting Art Histories initiative (2019-2022). His recent studies were published in journals such as Third Text or Artmargins (MIT Press) and included in publications like Curating Socialism (University of Toronto Press, 2026), Globalizing the Avant-Garde (De Gruyter/Brill, 2025), Plural and Multiple Geographies of Modern and Contemporary Art in East-Central Europe (Routledge, 2024), State Construction and Art in East Central Europe 1918-2018 (Routledge, 2022), Art History in a Global Context: Methods, Themes and Approaches (Wiley Blackwell, 2020); Realisms of the Avant-Garde (De Gruyter, 2020); and Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Event-based Art in Late Socialist Europe (Routledge, 2018). He edited the publication (In)Visible Frames. Rhetorics and Experimental Exhibition Practices in Romania 1965-1989 (2019, Idea) and co-edited the publication Contemporary Romanian Art 2010-2020 (2020, Hatje Cantz).

Dina Kagan is a PhD candidate in art history and holds an M.A. and a B.A. in art history as well as a degree in law from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, with periods of study in Venice, Rome, and Aix-en-Provence. She is a recipient of the Heinrich Wölflin Award. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art and photography, with particular emphasis on Eastern European and post-socialist contexts, and on questions arising from post- and decolonial theory and animal studies. She has held research and teaching positions at LMU Munich and curatorial roles at the Museum Brandhorst and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation. Alongside her academic work, she is active as a curator, writer, and art mediator.

12:00 — 12:30

Concluding Remarks