What Is to be Done?

The Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art (ICMA), in collaboration with the University of Łódź, the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and KEMKI – the Central European Research Institute for Art History in Budapest, organised, on 12–13 October 2023, at the George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași, the international conference entitled What Is to be Done? Methodological Challenges to Art Historical Research in Central and Eastern Europe.

The conference offered a framework for critical reflection on recent methodological transformations in art historical research in Central and Eastern Europe, within a context shaped by the re-evaluation of socialist art, renewed interest in transnational circulations, artistic networks and exhibition histories, as well as by the integration of decolonial, intersectional, and social art historical perspectives. At the same time, the discussions sought to interrogate the limits of established categories, to re-examine the relations between official and unofficial art, and to address pressing concerns of the present — from social justice, racialisation, and artistic labour to war, migration, social violence, the climate crisis, and the politics of care. Through this openness, the conference functioned as an international forum dedicated to reconsidering the discipline’s conceptual and methodological tools in relation both to the specificities of the region and to a broader comparative horizon that includes its relations with the Global South and other marginalised geographies of artistic production.

Introduction

Panel I • Revisiting socialist art: state-supported institutions, exhibitions, and cultural diplomacy

Panel II • Revisiting socialist art: artists’ networks and exhibition histories

Keynote Lecture I

Keynote Lecture II

Panel III • Social art history and Marxism in a socialist and post-socialist context

Panel IV • Critical art history in Eastern Europe: race and visual culture

Panel V • Critical art history in Eastern Europe: gender, labor, and decoloniality