Central & Eastern Europe

post Presents: Unsettled Dust—Archives, Epistemologies, Images

These presentations and panel discussion at MoMA brought together four filmmakers and artists who work in expanded documentary modes, using existing footage, archival research, interviews, and scripted narratives to produce imaginative accounts of transnational struggles, solidarities, and interventions. Using moving images, some of these practitioners interrogate the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the mid-late 20th…

Performative Gestures and Limits of Resistance in Armenian Contemporary Art (1987–2008), Part I

Series Introduction This series of three articles presents a selection of the performative practices in Armenian art in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods, practices that would herald the separation of nonofficial artists from the official Soviet cultural discourses and practices, and subsequently, in the 1990s, mark the institutionalization of nonofficial or semiofficial art as “contemporary…

Fighting the Authoritarian Machine from the Inside: Tamar Abakelia and Natela Iankoshvili

In this text, curator and writer Nina Mdivani revisits the lives and work of Tamar Abakelia (1905–1953) and her student Natela Iankoshvili (1918–2007). She emphasizes how these two Georgian women artists navigated between undertaking state commissions and finding windows of opportunity to oppose the regime and, in the process, creates a genealogy of Georgian artistic…

post presents: Art, Resistance, and New Narratives in Response to the War in Ukraine

On the evening of October 12, 2022, post presents hosted presentations and conversations with artists, scholars, and curators about the artistic responses to the war in Ukraine, looking at the period between the Maidan Revolution, which was followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and occupation of Donbas in 2014, and the full-scale Russian invasion launched on February 24, 2022. This conversation is a continuation of the presentations and conversations commenced that evening.

Where the Lightnings Have Their Palace: Erna Rosenstein and Global Surrealisms

In this text, Dorota Jagoda Michalska writes about Erna Rosenstein (1913–2004), a Jewish Polish postwar artist. Michalska opens up a transnational perspective, inviting us to look at the artist’s oeuvre through the lens of global surrealisms, connecting her articulations of Holocaust trauma with the work of artists who have dealt with slavery, genocide, exile, and colonial dispossession.