My first encounter with Christa Jeitner’s work Zakopane Tree (Zakopanischer Baum) was a black and white photograph of an outdoor scene in nature. It shows a hanging textile work in the center. Attached to almost leafless branches, the triangular fabric body hangs in the air while its ends rest on a field floor of stones and grass. Apart from a few tall, vaguely recognizable trees in the background, the upper part of the photograph is almost white, so that the dark branches and the light-col...| ARTMargins Online
Recent years have brought significant developments in the research on the neo-avant-garde beginnings of environmental art in Poland.(Among them is an upcoming book by Magdalena Worłowska on the beginnings of environmentally engaged art in Poland. See: Magdalena Worłowska, Początki sztuki ekologicznie zaangażowanej w Polsce (Warsaw: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, 2025).) The scholarly interest in the rise of ecological awareness in the country ...| ARTMargins Online
This special issue spanning ARTMargins Online and ARTMargins Print Journal derives from the ERC/UKRI supported project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) that foregrounds the contribution of environmental art history and research-driven contemporary ecocritical art to the interdisciplinary inquiry and epistemic endeavor of the Socialist Anthropocene.(The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) project is led by Maja Fowkes at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies; se...| ARTMargins Online
Zdravko Joksimović:A Glimmering Friendship, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, May 8 – August 25, 2025 Spanning almost four decades of creative production, the retrospective of sculptor Zdravko Joksimović at Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCAB) this summer defies convention. Rather than following a chronological trajectory, curator Miroslav Karić has chosen to organize more than 270 works—from drawings to ready-made paintings, assemblages, and sculptures—into twelve them...| ARTMargins Online
“Friendship: Writing Art Histories in Relation”: ARTMargins Workshop at UC Berkeley, November 7, 2025 This ARTMargins Workshop focuses on the notion and practice of “friendship” and related questions about elective affinity and difference in contexts of anti-colonial struggle, decolonization, and ambivalent participation in global circulation. To invoke “friends” in a global art history can be to emphasize the intersubjective dependencies of artists, to trace art worlds of materia...| ARTMargins Online
“Lead, zinc, copper, coal, gold, cadmium, silver, oil, tungsten, corundum, gasoline, nickel, marble, Glauber’s salt [and] phosphorites” flow from Kazakhstan through the “full arteries of railroads,” delivering its “industrial blood” across the Soviet Union “to feed the factories and plants,” before returning “in the shape of airplanes, tractors, excavators, automobiles [and] turbines.” This entry, under the heading “Socialist Metabolism,” appeared in an issue of the ...| ARTMargins Online
This article considers artworks that recorded the construction of four mega dams in Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia between the 1930s and 1960s, which as exemplary hydroforming projects trailblazed the expansion of the socialist developmentalist model to the non-Russian territories of the Soviet Union. As centrepieces of the planned economy, mega dams performed as engines of the expansion of heavy industry, as infrastructural hubs for resource extraction, as drivers of social ...| ARTMargins Online
This article examines the Turkestan-Siberia Railroad (Turksib) through its visual culture, exploring how film, painting, and print media portrayed its role in reshaping the Kazakh steppe. Analyzing Victor Turin’s Turksib (1929), American maps, Soviet periodicals, and paintings by Victor Ufimtsev and Abilkhan Kasteyev, it investigates how these works framed perceptions of infrastructure and environmental transformation. Situating Turksib within global infrastructural imaginaries and Soviet k...| ARTMargins Online
This article examines the temporal narratives embedded in the artistic representations of coal mining in post-war Poland, specifically focusing on the 1950s Upper Silesian region. By analyzing artworks from the period, including heroic socialist-realist representations of miners and practices of non-professional artists, supplemented by the insights from press, popular literature and documentary film, this article highlights how different cultural expressions engaged with both the prehistoric...| ARTMargins Online
This article examines how socialist realist paintings in Albania depict the transformation of nature during the country’s path to industrialization, revealing both the ideological aspirations and the material realities of socialist modernity. Moving beyond a simplistic reading of these artworks as mere propaganda, the study explores the variation in representations of nature—sometimes tamed, sometimes coexisting, and at times resisting transformation. It argues that these paintings, in th...| ARTMargins Online
This review essay focuses on recent publications that examine the art of former Soviet territories – the book Beginning in the Middle: Conversations on the Post-Soviet (2022), the reader As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories: Fragments for a Geopoetics of North Eurasia (2023), and the catalog Art in the Age of the Anthropocene (2023) of the eponymous exhibition –, aiming to understand how the three engage with postcolonial and the Anthropocene discourses. While Art in the Age of th...| ARTMargins Online
An entire mountain vanished in the 1950s in the Western Carpathians of Romania. Its uranium-rich rocks were transported by train to be processed into nuclear fuel in Sillamäe, in the former Soviet Union, now Estonia. Some were converted into nuclear warheads. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, those warheads were decommissioned and dismantled. Since 1995, the Megatons to Megawatts economic deal between Russia and the United States has transformed nuclear weapons into ele...| ARTMargins Online
“When Thoughts Change, Brush and Ink Cannot Remain Unchanged” is an open letter by renowned ink painter Fu Baoshi after his 1960 sketching tour organized by the Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy. This tour was a pivotal event in integrating traditional ink painting with Socialist cultural production, a response to the ideological demands of the Socialist state following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The article highlights the challenges faced by ink artists in adap...| ARTMargins Online
An open letter by renowned ink painter Fu Baoshi after his 1960 sketching tour organized by the Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy. ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 2, pp. 134-141. doi:10.1162/artm_a_00418 https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/14/2/134/131436/When-Thoughts-Change-Brush-and-Ink-Cannot-Remain The post When Thoughts Change, Brush and Ink Cannot Remain Unchanged appeared first on ARTMargins Online.| ARTMargins Online
Ukrainian wartime art, marked by resilience to Russia’s neocolonial violence, offers U.S. academia not only insight, but also a method of resisting violence, erasure, and authoritarianism.(All the views expressed in this article are my own.) When, in 2024, I began a series of research-led exhibitions aimed at integrating Ukrainian art practices into the global context, my primary aim was to bring Ukrainian art to U.S. universities to establish a productive interdisciplinary dialogue with a...| ARTMargins Online
Art of Peace: Art After War, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, February 1 – June 29, 2025 Arising out of a research project by academic and curator Kit Messham-Muir, the exhibition Art of Peace: Art After War showcases nine artists who respond to their experiences of three former conflicts, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda and Timor-Leste. Its most heartrending works document the memories of war in the minds and lives of those who have witnessed it. Among these powerful testimonia...| ARTMargins Online
Throughout his prolific career, artist Luchezar Boyadjiev has addressed the power dynamics of systems of belief, whether political, religious, or artistic. Long inspired by the public works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Boyadjiev explores the social conditions of public space and the urban environment through speculative projects – in the form of photographs, digital collages, temporary installations, performances, and public dialogues – that question traditional symbols of power and serv...| ARTMargins Online
Sung Tieu, 1992, 2025, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, February 15 – May 4, 2025 “…the question arises as to whether all social models of the modern era are not more or less successful attempts to delegate the horrors of exploitation to a majority in the interests of a minority or to various minorities in the name of a majority…”—Heiner Müller, “Das Liebesleben der Hyänen,” 1993* Over two floors at the KW Institute in Berlin, Sung Tieu’s exhibition 1992, 2025 of...| ARTMargins Online
In recent years, US scholarship has succeeded in establishing a new perspective on the art of the ex-GDR that overcomes the dichotomy between so-called “dissident art” on the one hand, and “official art,” on the other. Rather than cementing this dichotomy, scholars of this new trend in art historical research points out and study the interconnections and entanglement between official and non-official art. At the same time, they have developed a discourse that subjects the well-establi...| ARTMargins Online
Irfan Hošić, Slika krize. Kulturne i umjetničke prilike u Bosni i Hercegovini (1990-2020) / The Image of Crisis: Cultural and Artistic Circumstances in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1990–2020) (Sarajevo: Buybook, 2024), 215 pp. The title of Irfan Hošić’s book, The Image of Crisis: Cultural and Artistic Circumstances in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1990–2020), announces a focus on three decades of development for the country’s art and visual culture. The eponymous “image of crisis” emer...| ARTMargins Online
This issue of ARTMargins marks a return of the journal’s essay component, leading with an extensive exploration of socially engaged art by John Roberts, who questions what art as a form of social and aesthetic praxis can or cannot achieve beyond the remit of art itself. Roberts approaches socially engaged art as a form of radical aisthesis that draws, among other things, on the aesthetics of the negative that characterize parts of the historical avant-garde. ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 1, ...| ARTMargins Online
The article analyzes the global context of socially engaged art, through focusing on the critical relationship between the Zapatista and Rojava insurgencies, post-alter globalization politics and socially engaged art in period of unipolar American imperialism, and the planetary consolidation of neoliberalism. In what ways does socially engaged art globally derive its production of modes of direct democracy from the ‘enclave politics’ of the Zapatista and Rojava? And to what ends are the v...| ARTMargins Online
As a post-68 phenomenon of the Yugoslav cultural scene, the Bosch+Bosch group was established by young artists from the multicultural Vojvodina in 1969. In addition to generational cohesion, the group’s identity was defined by the conceptual and experimental agenda of the New Art Practice and the hybridity of languages and cultures. Although most of them belonged to the Hungarian-speaking minority culture, their intellectual horizon was defined by the majority Yugoslav culture, which was op...| ARTMargins Online
The emergence of mail art in Poland in the beginning of 1970s coincided with the popularization of neo-avant-garde and conceptual art in the region. Its first comprehensive theocratization came with the NET manifesto written by Andrzej Kostołowski and Jarosław Kozłowski in 1971 which proposed a creation of a network of exchange of art that was based on openness, engagement, expansion and decentralization. At the same time the transformation of the political landscape in the country followi...| ARTMargins Online
This article foregrounds the Japanese artist Imai Norio’s contribution to the development and critique of the moving image in the context of Japanese contemporary art and society in the 1970s. While existing art historical scholarship has primarily discussed Imai’s work as a part of the collective activities of the Gutai Art Association (1954–72), I focus on his film and video works created after the dissolution of the group in 1972. The 1970 World Exposition in Osaka served as a critic...| ARTMargins Online
This article reexamines the 1960s work of Iranian painter and stage director Bahman Mohassess (1931–2010) through the lens of parody, highlighting his nuanced critique of both Western cultural dominance and Iranian political realities. A close analysis of Mohassess’ 1965 Untitled painting, against the backdrop of his 1967 Tehran staging of Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV, reveals his subversive appropriation of the equestrian motif—a loaded symbol in post-1953 coup Iran, where Reza Shah...| ARTMargins Online
This essay reviews two publications that center on the agency of visual culture in shaping modern life and subjectivity in 1950-70s Lebanon. Rooted in cultural anthropology, Zeina Maasri’s Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (2020) and Kirsten Scheid’s Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920-1950 (2022) depart from poststructuralist models of visual studies, emphasizing instead the concrete materiality and affective strength of the art...| ARTMargins Online
This project takes its inspiration from a long interview and a study of a number of private social media accounts of men advertising their services as massage therapists on gay dating apps, in a city where intimacy between men is both governed and controlled by the state. ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 1, pp. 116-131. doi:10.1162/artm_a_00408 https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/14/1/116/130988/Only-Massage The post Only Massage appeared first on ARTMargins Online.| ARTMargins Online
In her 1965 essay “Lustro rzeczywistości czy uległe tworzywo” [mirror of reality, or submissive material], presented here in its first English translation as “Reflection or Creation,” Urszula Czartoryska investigates the photographic medium’s capacity for creative intervention. Among her case studies are Polish photographers Karol Hiller, Zbigniew Dłubak, and Fortunata Obrąpalska, who she situates as interconnected, international artists working within a context that encompasses...| ARTMargins Online
ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 1, pp. 156-165. doi:10.1162/artm_a_00407 https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/14/1/156/130982/Reflection-or-Creation-from-The-Artistic The post “Reflection or Creation” from The Artistic Adventures of Photography appeared first on ARTMargins Online.| ARTMargins Online
Gastarbeiter 2.0: Arbeit means Rad, at nGbK Berlin, April 13 – June 16, 2024 Jelena Fužinato’s mobile structure Builder’s Daughter: Everything is Peachy stands at the entrance to Gastarbeiter 2.0: Arbeit means Rad, an ambitious new exhibition hosted by the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK). Composed from the same gleaming chrome as all of the installations in the exhibition, the piece takes the form of scaffolding holding a landscape painting of the artist’s home in Prijed...| ARTMargins
Jasmina Tumbas, I am Jugoslovenka! Feminist performance politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 344 pp. Reading the first chapter of Jasmina Tumbas’ publication I am Jugoslovenka! made me smile and think of my mother. The author cites Bojana Pejić talking about wearing original Levi’s jeans. My mother grew up in socialist—explicitly not communist—Poland, and moved to the Netherlands in the 1980s, when she was in her twenties. When...| ARTMargins
As Michelle Henning points out in her book Photography: The Unfettered Image (2018), “from its inception, photography was a means to set images free, to allow them to go traveling, to transfer, to be projected, translated, fragmented, reconstituted and reversed, to be reimagined and re-embodied.”(Michelle Henning, Photography: The Unfettered Image (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. xi.) How does this perspective contribute to understanding the medium beyond its treatment in art museums, whic...| ARTMargins
Since the beginning of its mandate, the newly elected (2023) Slovak government has been spreading discriminatory, homophobic, and xenophobic narratives, and proposing new policies, usually without any public debate or negotiations with the professional public. The new Minister of Culture is Martina Šimkovičová from the Slovak National Party (SNS), who formerly worked at the private television station Markíza (from which she was fired after her hateful comments against refugees on social m...| ARTMargins
A short glance at the East/East dialogues within the timeline of Romanian art of the 1970s and 1980s allows us to identify existing (in)formal cross-border exchanges which foregrounded geopolitical alliances and sporadically connected Romanian artists with like-minded spirits. In the artistic context of the 1970s and 1980s, the state institutions were responsible for foreign cultural agreements and the organization of research trips and touring exhibitions, as well as establishing cultural co...| ARTMargins
IF THE BERLIN WIND BLOWS MY FLAG: ART AND INTERNATIONALISM BEFORE THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL AT DAADGALERIE, N.B.K., AND GALERIE IM KÖRNERPARK, SEPTEMBER 9, 2023 – JANUARY 14, 2024 The exact aim of the large-scale, three-site exhibition, When the Berlin Wind Blows My Flag: Art and Internationalism Before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, is difficult to define. The first sentence of the exhibition’s introductory text promised to offer insight “into the history of the DAAD Artists-in-B...| ARTMargins
Illiberal Lives, at Ludwig Forum Aachen, April 22, 2023 – September 10, 2023 The group exhibition Illiberal Lives contributes to a rich and provocative debate on art both as a subject and object of liberal market logic. It is curated by Eva Birkenstock, Anselm Franke, Holger Otten and Kerstin Stakemeier, with works by Pauline Curnier Jardin, Johanna Hedva, Ho Rui An, Blaise Kirschner, Jota Mombaça, Henrike Naumann, Melika Ngombe Kolongo, Bassem Saad, Mikołaj Sobczak, and Jordan Strafer. A...| ARTMargins
East European art scenes have long invited mostly negative comparisons with their West European counterparts. During the Cold War era, external perceptions often blurred the many differences between state socialisms and their related cultural fields. For their part, local artists and art historians in the countries of Eastern Europe criticized such homogenizing accounts, pointing instead to the many, and wide-ranging, Western connections of individual artists or artist groups with the West, a...| ARTMargins
In 1978, Nick Waterlow, the artistic director of the third Sydney Biennale, “European Dialogue,” visited Budapest and agreed with the Hungarian art historian, László Beke that he would put together an informative exhibition of documents and original works covering the activities of several Hungarian artists. Beke, who was by then an internationally renowned advocate of East European Conceptualisms accepted this task but avoided the burdensome role of a national consultant by involving a...| ARTMargins Online
