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Book Launch: Horizontal Art History and Beyond
03 February 2023, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm
A Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) panel discussion on horizontality in global art history with Agata Jakubowska (Institute of Art History Warsaw), Magdalena Radomska (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań), Jelena Stojković (Oxford Brookes University), Dimitra Gkitsa (SSEES UCL), and Maja and Reuben Fowkes (IAS UCL).
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All | UCL staff | UCL students
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT)
Location
-
IAS ForumG17, ground floor, South WingUCL, Gower Street, LondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
This event takes as its focus the influential concept and methodology of “horizontal art history” developed by Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski (1952-2015) to challenge the verticality of Western art history. Developed in the context of his pioneering work on comparative East European art history, Piotrowski’s horizontalizing approach has been borrowed and adapted for the study of other regions as part of the art historiographical toolbox of a decentred global art history.
The occasion for this discussion is the London launch of Horizontal Art History and Beyond: Revising Peripheral Critical Practices (Routledge, 2022) in the company of its co-editors, Dr. Agata Jakubowska from the Institute of Art History Warsaw and Dr. Magdalena Radomska, Head of the Piotr Piotrowski Centre for Research on East-Central European Art at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. This edited volume brings together the work of international scholars who examine the relevance of the theory and practice of horizontal art history within and beyond the region of Central and Eastern Europe.
Their presentations will be followed by an invited response from Dr. Jelena Stojković, Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory at Oxford Brookes University, and Dr. Dimitra Gkitsa, Alexander Nash Fellow in Albanian Studies in the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. The panel is organized by the UCL Postsocialist Art Centre and introduced by Dr. Maja Fowkes and Dr. Reuben Fowkes, co-authors of Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020). This is event realized with the support of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies.
Attendance is free of charge, but please register in advance: https://horizontal-art.eventbrite.co.uk
About the Speakers
Magdalena Radomska
Post-Marxist art historian and historian of philosophy, Assistant Professor at Pat Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland
She holds a PhD in art history, and has received scholarships at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. In 2013 her book The Politics of Movements of Hungarian Neoavantgarde (1966-80) was published. Currently Radomska is engaged in a research on the Post-Communist art in Post-Communist Europe (grant received from the National Science Center) and criticism of capitalism in art (book: The Plural Subject: Art and Crisis after 2008) and - as her second PhD – she is writing a monograph on Post-Marxism. She is a member of both Polish and Hungarian AICA and editor of magazine Czas Kultury. Radomska is a founder and director of the Piotr Piotrowski Centre for Research On East-Central European Art.
Agata Jakubowska
Historian of modern and contemporary art
She received her master’s degree in 1995 and her doctorate in 2000 at the Institute of Art History of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan under the supervision of Professor Piotr Piotrowski (thesis published as On the margins of the mirror. The female body in the works of Polish female artists, in Polish, Cracow: Universitas, 2004). She received her habilitation in 2009 based on the book Multiple Portrait of the Work of Alina Szapocznikow (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2008). Until 2021, she worked at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, heading the Chair of Modern Art History from 2009 to 2020. At the Warsaw University, she conducts a research project entitled “Globalizing the History of All-Women Exhibitions” (2021-2025, funded by the National Science Centre). She also conducts with Prof. Andrea Giunta (University of Buenos Aires) a research seminar “Narrating Art and Feminism. Eastern Europe and Latin America” (as part of the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories initiative).
Jelena Stojković
Art historian and critic
She is based in London. She holds BAs in Arabic and Japanese Language and Literature from Belgrade University, MA in Art History from SOAS, University of London and PhD in Photography from University of Westminster. She is the author of Surrealism and Photography in 1930s Japan: The Impossible Avant-Garde (Routledge, 2020) and has recently contributed exhibition catalogue entries to Surrealism Beyond Borders (The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern, 2021-22) and Avant-Garde Rising: The Photographic Vanguard in Modern Japan (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2022). She was a Japan Foundation Fellow affiliated with the University of Tokyo and a Balsdon Fellow at the British School at Rome and is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory at the School of Arts, Oxford Brookes University.
Dimitra Gkitsa
Alexander Nash Fellow in Albanian Studies at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
She holds postgraduate degrees in Curating (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Cultural Management (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens), and completed her doctoral studies in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London (2020). Her PhD thesis, entitled “Affective Commoning: Collective Curating in the Post-socialist Space,” examined art collectives and collaborative practices in Albania, Serbia, and North Macedonia. Her research is situated in the intersection of memory studies, affect, activism, contemporary art and curatorial practices, and the post-socialist visual cultures, with a particular focus on the geo-political region of Southeast Europe.
Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London
Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021), The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015) and a special issue of Third Text entitled Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism (2018). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions Colliding Epistemes at Bozar Brussels (2022) and Potential Agrarianism at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their Horizon Europe project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research grant. www.translocal.org