Instruction and the Didactic Impulse in Postwar Art from Eastern Europe

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 October 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).