The 2019 SHERA Emerging Scholar Prize was awarded to Alice Isabella Sullivan (University of Michigan) for her article “The Athonite Patronage of Stephen III of Moldavia, 1457-1504,” Speculum 94.1 (2019): 1-46.

The jury consisted of Carolyn Guile, Colleen McQuillen, Marie-Alice L’Heureux.

Jury commendation: After contextualizing Stephen III’s activities within the mid-fourteenth-century legacy of patronage directed from within the sub-Carpathian Romanian-speaking lands, Sullivan demonstrates how the Prince’s “aspirations as a Christian ruler and protector of Orthodox faith” (8) in a kingdom perceived as a bulwark of Christianity, and his fashioning himself “an heir to the authority of Byzantine emperors among Christian peoples under Ottoman control”(4) motivated his activities as a patron of Athonite monasteries of the “Holy Mount”. The committee felt this highly original study deserves the Prize for its new and significant contribution to our understanding of not only how sacred landscapes developed within the northeastern Greek territories in the nearly fifty-year period of Stephen III’s rule, but also how princely patronage from Europe’s eastern borderlands had a direct and profound impact on the broader reification of Byzantine culture after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to focus on the study of Byzantine ideology in these lands (historical Wallachia, Moldavia) in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries, Sullivan turns a conventional center-periphery argument on its head. An impressive linguistic and material array of primary sources that includes liturgical artifacts, vestments, manuscripts, buildings, inscriptions, and monetary records in Church Slavonic, Greek and Romanian underpins Sullivan’s deft elucidation of the connection between cross-cultural exchange and contemporary patronage. The committee would like to recognize and praise the intellectual work that a study of this type requires, the clarity of its presentation, and the demonstration of how the study of “borderland” territories is essential to how we interpret and theorize cross-cultural exchange.

Next Emerging Scholar Prize deadline: September 30, 2020

SHERA is currently seeking self-nominations and nominations for three positions on the SHERA Board:

Web News Editor (1-year term, with subsequent 2-year option for renewal, begins January 1, 2020). The Web News Editor maintains and updates the Society’s website and social media accounts.

Secretary-Treasurer (2-year term, January 1, 2020 – January 1, 2022). The Secretary-Treasurer oversees the Society’s bank accounts, maintains the membership directory, and oversees elections for officers and By-Laws amendments.

Listserv Administrators (2-year term, January 1, 2020-January 1, 2022). Listserv Administrators oversee and moderate H-SHERA.

SHERA seeks to include among its leaders colleagues at every career stage, from diverse professional backgrounds, and with a broad range of research specialties. Please consider getting involved with SHERA in a formal role to help shape the future of the organization.

For more information on any of these positions, please contact the SHERA Board at shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com.

Please submit nominations to shera.membership@gmail.com by Sunday, December 8. Online voting will take place December 9-13, 2018.

SHERA Membership Renewals!

Membership in the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) is open to all those interested in the study of the visual and material cultures of Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia from the pre-modern periods into the present. SHERA has members across the world and continues to grow as an organization. Please consider renewing your SHERA Membership for 2020, and encourage other friends and colleagues to join! SHERA Membership is open to students, teachers of any rank at any institution (elementary, secondary, college, university), art and architecture professionals, independent scholars, curators, librarians, art dealers, collectors, and any other individual or institutions who are interested in the work and mission of the organization.

SHERA members receive the following benefits:

· Regular news and updates through SHERA’s communication platform, the H-SHERA network on H-Net.

· SHERA Website with details about the organization and resources

· SHERA Directory with specialists in East European, Eurasian, and Russian art and architecture

· SHERA Reviews of recent publications

· Sponsorship of Conference Sessions: SHERA sponsors sessions at CAA and ASEEES every year.

· Graduate Student / Independent Scholar Research Grant in the amount of $500 for research and/or study toward the completion of a thesis, dissertation, or publication (deadline: April 15)

· Graduate Student / Independent Scholar Travel Grants for CAA and ASEEES to defray the cost of attending the conference (deadlines: June 1 for ASEEES; October 1 for CAA)

· Emerging Scholar Prize that recognizes and encourages original and innovative scholarship in the field (deadline: September 30)

Memberships are valid 1 January 2020 - 31 December 2020.

2020 MEMBERSHIP FEES (in USD): Student ($15), Member ($30), Contributor ($50), Sustainer ($100), Patron ($250), Sponsor ($500).

Institutions can become SHERA Institutional Members ($150), which includes a free individual membership for a representative of the institution.

You may JOIN or RENEW your membership online (http://www.shera-art.org/membership/renew.php) or with a check, mailed to the address on the attached form. Please, be in touch if you have any questions or concerns.

Call for Participants

Summer School Communicating Difficult Pasts in Kuldīga, 2–7 August 2019

Deadline for applications: 3 June.

MA and PhD humanities students, as well as early-career artists, art historians, curators and cultural studies researchers are welcome to apply.

We live in a time of increasing violence, which is gender, community and class based. These aspects need to be considered in order to understand its operation, while finding ways to communicate both past and present violence has become pertinent for understanding contemporary societies. This year’s Summer School programme will explore the complexities of communicating the 20th-century past, and analyse how art and culture can advance debates and thus influence current realities.

For the sixth year the Summer School of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) is held in cooperation with Kuldīga Artist Residency, the Art Academy of Latvia and the Estonian Academy of Arts. The Summer School continues to draw on developments in critical thinking, artistic research and creative practices related to actual debates in contemporary culture. This year its central theme will be how violent pasts remain with us and how contemporary artistic research and curatorial projects have found ways to mediate their different dimensions. Our programme will bring together interdisciplinary scholars, artists and curators who have analysed the contemporary legacies of the Second World War and related them to Cold War and postcolonial frameworks.

Difficult knowledge (Roger Simon, Erica Lehrer) and difficult heritage (Sharon MacDonald) offer important perspectives to traumatic and long-silenced histories and modes of their remembering. These discourses bring themes which are often invisible or marginalised in public knowledge. Artists and scholars engaging with these subjects confront the increasingly prevailing representations of selective memory, which by rejecting particular experiences, ignore difficult history. The mediations of difficult pasts we will touch upon concern violent conflicts and traumatic losses, their afterlives in personal experiences, the lives of communities owing to forced migration and deportation, subjugation of indigenous people, practices of exclusion and othering of communities. In the workshops we will consider how could more complex and layered histories be told that complement disputed pasts with new perspectives, in ways that combine critical consciousness with empathic understanding and how could violent histories be narrated in ethical and audience-conscious ways.

The Summer School Communicating Difficult Pasts will focus on the uneasy relations between pasts and presents, their entangled nature in the 20th century and the impact that these difficult histories have left to contemporary realities in the Baltic Sea region. Topics such as the legacy of right- and left-wing ideologies and their impact on rising populism, intolerance towards cultural difference and marginalisation of ethnic minorities or queer communities are entangled in the region with histories of the Holocaust, Soviet repressions and colonialisms. These experiences are often addressed, researched and discussed locally or nationally; this Summer School aims at understanding the relationships between these difficult and traumatic pasts and articulating their influences and presence today through the perspective of shared histories. We will consider how to apply intersectionality to thinking about the past and present in the Baltic Sea region.

Speakers organising workshops and lectures are distinguished thinkers and experts in the fields of visual art, cultural history and theory, as well as memory, feminist and LGBTQ+ studies. They will introduce research and curatorial projects and discuss intersections between minority studies, postcommunist and postcolonial discourses. The speakers include Violeta Davoliūtė, Professor of Political Science at Vilnius University (tbc), Ilya Lensky, Director of the Museum ‘Jews in Latvia’ (tbc), artist Harri Pälviranta from Finland, Adi Kuntsman, Senior Lecturer from the Manchester Metropolitan University and Norwegian-Sami artist Máret Ánne Sara.

The curators of the Summer School programme are Ieva Astahovska and Margaret Tali.

Participation in the Summer School is free of charge; however, participants must cover partial accommodation and catering costs of 80 EUR.

To apply to participate, please fill out the application form: tiny.cc/lccasummerschool and submit it by email with a CV and a letter of motivation in English by email. Additionally, you can add a creative portfolio including projects or one to two publications related to the theme.

The deadline for applications is 3 June 2019. Please email the documents to: lccasummerschool@gmail.com. We will respond to applicants by 14 June.

For any questions regarding application, please contact Ieva Astahovska at ieva.ast@gmail.com

Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection at Hebrew Home at Riverdale is pleased to announce its latest exhibition, From the Eastern Bloc to the Bronx: Early Acquisitions from The Art Collection, on view in the Derfner Judaica Museum from May 5–August 25, 2019. A reception and curator’s talk will be held on Sunday, May 19, 2019, from 1:30–3 p.m. in the Museum, located at 5901 Palisade Avenue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. This event is free and open to the public. R.S.V.P. 718.581.1596 or art@hebrewhome.org. Photo I.D. required for entry at all times. The exhibition is part of the Derfner Judaica Museum’s 10th Anniversary celebration, which will include several events and activities throughout the summer.

From the Eastern Bloc to the Bronx tells the fascinating story of how the Grosvenor Gallery in London promoted artists from Eastern Bloc countries and came to play a central role in shaping the Hebrew Home Art Collection. Some of the first works acquired for The Art Collection were by artists who were included in solo and group exhibitions at the Gallery, which was founded in 1960 by the American sociologist Eric Estorick (1913–1993). Estorick was instrumental in efforts by the Hebrew Home’s former executive director Jacob Reingold (1916–1999), with the support of a few key donors, to establish The Art Collection in the 1970s. His gallery created a niche for the exhibition of Eastern Bloc artists in the 1960s when art from “behind the Iron Curtain” was largely unseen and unknown by Western audiences. Living and working during the height of the Cold War in the Soviet Socialist Republics of Armenia and Russia and satellite states Hungary and Czechoslovakia (today the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic), most of these artists were rarely, if ever, exhibited in the West.

This exhibition features works by 35 artists who participated in nine key exhibitions that took place at Grosvenor Gallery between 1961–1967, before the Hebrew Home began to acquire the artwork about a decade later. Today, some of these artists have well established reputations internationally or in their home countries, or both. For example, Soviet dissident artist Oscar Rabin (1928–2018), founder of the Nonconformist movement and exiled to Paris in 1978, has been the subject of several major exhibitions and a documentary film; eminent Slovak artist Vincent Hložník (1919–1997), founder of the highly influential Department of Graphic Art and Illustration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, will have a major retrospective at the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Bratislava, Slovak Republic, in 2020; and the work of Mariam Aslamazian (1907–2006) is on permanent view at a museum in Gyumri, Armenia, dedicated to the artist and her sister.

Grosvenor Gallery’s initial exhibition of Eastern Bloc artists, entitled Lithographs by Twenty-seven Soviet Artists, took place in 1961, and proved to be Estorick’s first success in obtaining permission to export Soviet artwork to the West. The exhibition featured Russian printmakers from the Leningrad Experimental Graphics Laboratory (LEGL), a workshop that included master lithographers who used the medium to create intricate images with complex color palettes. Prints by ten artists from that show, Boris Ermolaev (1903–1982), Grigory Izrailevich (1924–1999), Anatoli Kaplan (1902–1980), Vera Matiukh (1910–2003), Gerta Nemenova (1905–1986), Alexander Shenderov (1897–1967), Mikhail Skouliari (1905–1985), Vladimir Sudakov (1912–1994), Alexander Vedernikov (1898–1975) and Alexandra Yakobson (1903–1966), are among the works later acquired for The Art Collection that are on view in the present exhibition. The London exhibition garnered enough commercial and critical success that it was remounted (with work by all but two of the original artists) in New York City later that same year. Subsequently, The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired prints by five of the artists, including Ermolaev, Kaplan, Nemenova, Shenderov and Vedernikov.

Following the LEGL exhibition, Estorick mounted a large solo show of Kaplan at the end of 1961 entitled Anatoli Kaplan: The World of Sholem Aleichem and Other Scenes, Tales and Songs of Russian Provincial Life, which included 131 prints. Kaplan worked almost exclusively on Jewish themes and was widely collected both privately and by museums, including The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the 1960s. He was of particular interest to Estorick, who expanded some of his print editions exclusively for Grosvenor Gallery, including The Little Goat (1958–1961), a song from the Passover liturgy. Two of The Little Goat prints and three of his other lithographs are on view in the current exhibition. Six portfolios of different print series by Kaplan along with four paintings by the Russian Jewish painter Solomon Gershov (1906–1989), who appeared in a two-person exhibition with Kaplan in 1967, were the first works acquired by Hebrew Home from Grosvenor Gallery in 1975. These selections likely reflected Estorick’s and Reingold’s shared interest in promoting Jewish artists working under oppressive conditions.

The Gallery held a major retrospective of the master Russian printmaker Vladimir Favorsky (1886–1964) in 1962. Titled Favorsky, it included linocut prints from the artist’s Samarkand series (1942) realized during the artist’s evacuation to Uzbekistan during World War II, among other works from his long career. Three of these rare prints on view depict scenes from everyday life of the Uzbek people among their caravans and camels.

The Gallery celebrated its move to a larger space in 1963 with the group show, First Image: Painting and Sculpture by Artists of the Gallery, which included Czech artist Richard Fremund (1928–1969), who is represented in the current exhibition by two abstract townscape paintings, Easter Landscape (1963) and Blue Landscape (1957). Today, Fremund is frequently shown in galleries in the Czech Republic and his paintings held in private collections. Also included in First Image were Hungarian artists Gyula Konfár (1933–2008) and Mihály Schéner (1923–2009), who went on to have a two-person exhibition the following year. Gyula Konfár, Mihály Schéner: Two Contemporary Hungarian Artists, mounted in 1964, featured 52 paintings. Two works from that show were later acquired for The Art Collection and are included in the present exhibition: Konfár’s White Cottages, Red Roofs and Schéner’s Self-Portrait at Work, both from 1964, which share a dark, expressionistic style.

One of Estorick’s most important exhibitions was Aspects of Contemporary Soviet Art, mounted in 1964, which featured paintings and works on paper. Estorick managed a cultural coup by obtaining permission to export paintings and drawings from the Soviet Union, a task with far greater obstacles than exporting lithographs as he had in 1961. As British art critic Nigel Gosling wrote for The Observer in 1964: “The show is a milestone. For the first time in 40 years Soviet paintings are exhibited for sale outside Russia.” The Hebrew Home owns 19 of the paintings that were included in Aspects of Contemporary Soviet Art, with selected works on view by Aslamazian, Alexander Dubinchik (1922–1997), Irina Fateeva (1908–1981), Moisey Feigen (1904–2008), Vladimir Gavrilov (1923–1970), Vladimir Gedikyan (b. 1928), Grigoriev (dates unknown), Mikhail Ivanov (1926–2000), Pavel Kuznetsov (1878–1968), Alexey Morosov (1896–1965), Anatoli Nikitch (1918–1994), Pyotr Ossovsky (1925–2015), Albert Papikian (1926–1997), Alexsei Pisarev (1909–1970), Igor Popov (1927–1999), Peter Shlikov (1917–1920), Galina Solovieva (1908-1984) and Leonid Zakharov (1928–1986).

Turning to Czechoslovak art, Vincent Hložník was a major solo show comprising paintings and graphics mounted in 1965. Hložník is represented in this exhibition by two linocuts from the series Dreams (1962), a cycle of surrealistic prints that caution about the horrors of war. While a student in Prague, he was present when the Germans occupied the city in 1939 and was dramatically impacted by the atrocities he witnessed. Hložník left a lasting legacy through his students and his humanistic approach to art continues to influence generations of Slovak graphic artists today. His work is on permanent view in galleries and museums in the Slovak Republic.

Rabin, founder of the Nonconformist movement in Moscow in the 1970s and a major international artist today, had his first solo exhibition in the West at Grosvenor Gallery in 1965. The two paintings that represent him in this exhibition, Cats Under Crescent Moon (1963) and Bread and Factory (1964), were included in the original Grosvenor show. Rabin was an organizer of the infamous “bulldozer exhibition” held outside Moscow in 1974. In an incident that became widely reported internationally, dissident artists who were prohibited from participating in official galleries mounted an exhibition in an empty lot that was brutally shut down by the Soviet authorities with water cannons and bulldozers. Exiled four years later and prevented from returning from a visit to Paris, where he remained until his death in 2018, Rabin and his family were abruptly stripped of their Soviet citizenship. His work is widely collected and held in both private and public collections, including the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, New Jersey, The Centre Pompidou, Paris, and The Kolodzei Collection, Highland Park, New Jersey, among others.

One of the last exhibitions focused exclusively on Soviet Bloc artists, The World of Sholem Aleichem: Kaplan lithographs, Gershov paintings, was presented in 1967. It featured Kaplan’s portfolios alongside Gershov’s paintings. Gershov painted in an expressionistic style, often on Jewish themes, and was critical of Soviet art policies. He suffered harsh consequences for his views and was arrested twice, once in 1932 and again in 1948, and sent to the Gulag after having his work destroyed. He is represented by the painting Tevye (ca. 1963–64), an imaginary portrait of the protagonist of Aleichem’s series of short stories, Tevye the Milkman.

This exhibition highlights rare artworks in the Hebrew Home’s Art Collection, which has attracted researchers, curators and dignitaries from around the world, and also provides a fascinating glimpse into the modern art being created during the Cold War in the Eastern Bloc and how it was brought to the West’s attention by Eric Estorick. The Grosvenor Gallery’s focus on exhibitions of Eastern Bloc artists was concentrated in the period 1961–1967, according to the Gallery’s available records, and coincided with an ambitious general program of a dozen or more exhibitions each year. During this same period, the Gallery organized at least 80 or more exhibitions by other artists, mostly from Western Europe, in solo and group exhibitions. While he moved his focus away from Soviet Bloc artists after 1967, Estorick continued to include some of these artists in other broader, thematic group shows. Many works by Eastern Bloc artists remained in Gallery inventory beyond these critical years in the early to mid-1960s and were thus available for the Hebrew Home to acquire in the 1970s. Although Estorick died in 1993, the Grosvenor Gallery remains active in London to this day.

About Hebrew Home at Riverdale

As a member of the American Alliance of Museums, the Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Health is committed to publicly exhibiting its art collection throughout its 32-acre campus, including the Derfner Judaica Museum and a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades. Now in its 10th year, the Derfner Judaica Museum first opened its doors in the recently completed Jacob Reingold Pavilion at the Hebrew Home campus in 2009. Originally founded as The Judaica Museum in 1982, it was renamed that year in honor of benefactors Helen and Harold Derfner and formally merged with The Art Collection. The Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection provides educational and cultural programming for residents of the Hebrew Home, their families and the general public from throughout New York City, its surrounding suburbs and visitors from elsewhere. RiverSpring Health is a nonprofit, non-sectarian geriatric organization serving more than 18,000 older adults in greater New York through its resources and community service programs. Museum hours: Sunday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Art Collection and grounds open daily, 10:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. Call 718.581.1596 for holiday hours and to schedule group tours, or for further information, visit our website at RiverSpringHealth.org/art

Curatorial collective What, How and for Whom / WHW announces an open call for applications to participate in the second year of WHW Akademija, an international art study program based in Zagreb, Croatia. The program runs from November 4, 2019, to May 31, 2020.

Application Deadline: April 29, 2019

Selection interviews – in person (for Zagreb-based applicants) and over Skype – will be conducted between May 20 – 31, 2019.

Results will be announced by mid-June 2019.

WHW Akademija is a new program for emerging artists. It aims to foster new forms of self-determination, based on modes of critical reflection, curiosity, and encounters among artists, artworks, art professionals, scholars and practitioners across disciplines. The WHW Akademija shares part of its title with the WHW curatorial collective, who drew their name from an acronym of the three basic questions of every economic organization: What, How & for Whom. WHW Akademija departs from the notion of the ‘conscious citizen,’ aiming to offer a broad educational spectrum and access to conflicting ideas and opinions, as well as to incorporate principles and values applicable to wider social and political life. It is imagined as a place for testing ideas, making discoveries and encouraging trial and errors. The program of WHW Akademija endeavors to position the notion of ‘learning by doing’ as a crucial element in the reciprocal educational process, which encourages students to actively co-produce critical content. In doing so, WHW Akademija highlights the collective methods of co-learning.

The resident professors throughout this year’s program are David Maljković and Kate Sutton, who will collaboratively develop a mentoring program and regular meetings for the students; and Sanja Iveković who will conduct a masterclass for the participants on a monthly basis. Guest professors are Banu Cennetoğlu, DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti) and Manuel Pelmuş. Participants will be invited to participate in shaping part of the program by suggesting and developing associations with local figures and initiatives.

The Advisory Board members of WHW Akademija are David Maljković, Emily Pethick, Kathrin Rhomberg and Christine Tohme.

WHW Akademija is realized in partnership with the Kontakt Art Collection. The collection focuses on experimental and neo-avant-garde art activities in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe from the late 1950s onwards. The manifold artistic positions included in the Kontakt Art Collection will serve as one of the foundations for discussions and interventions of other formats in WHW Akademija.

In the first year of the program, 2018 – 2019, the resident professors were Ben Cain, Tina Gverović and Sanja Iveković, with Pierre Bal Blanc, Rajkamal Khalon, Adam Szymczyk and Wendelien van Oldenborgh serving as guest professors. Additionally, the WHW Akademija welcomed guest speakers and collaborators including Charles Esche, Greg de Cuir, Mladen Domazet, Ana Janevski, Božena Končić Badurina, Oscar Murillo, Manuel Pelmuş, Kathrin Rhomberg, Dubravka Sekulić, Marko Tadić, Goran Trbuljak, Jelena Vesić, and Želimir Žilnik, among others.

The participants of the inaugural 2018-19 year are: Laura Barić (Zagreb); Jakub Danilewicz (Gdańsk); Philippa Driest (Rotterdam); Vida Guzmić (Zagreb); Larion Lozovoy (Kyiv); Petra Mrša (Rijeka); Jelena Petric (Zagreb); and Paky Vlassopoulou (Athens.)

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

WHW Akademija is a 7-month study program for 8 to 12 international participants. It is open to individuals seeking to deepen their formal, theoretical and critical skills in art, and who are at the beginning of developing an independent artistic practice. Students will be engaged in an intense process of working and learning, combining discursive formats and a number of practical exercises, including encounters with the public.

Participants will have access to a shared WHW working space and a small production fund. Some of the program’s lectures and seminars will be public. The working language of WHW Akademija is English.

The 2019-20 program includes continuous support provided by resident professors, David Maljković, Kate Sutton, as well as members of WHW (Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović) as core faculty. The resident professors will lead group and individual critique sessions, while WHW will provide mentoring support throughout the process. The guest professors Banu Cennetoğlu, DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti) and Manuel Pelmuş will each conduct a two-week workshop consisting of both collective work and individual critiques with the students. Additionally, the program will include seminars led by international and local guests (to be announced later), as well as seminars based on the works in the Kontakt Art Collection, led by WHW.

WHW Akademija will begin November 4 with an in-depth introduction to the program allowing the students to get to know one other’s practices as well as aspects of Zagreb’s local cultural and activist scene.

ADMISSION

For 2019-2020, students will be selected through an open call. Applicants should be practicing artists with or without formal training.

Your application should be submitted through this application form by April 29, 2019, and include the following information:

A full CV
A short biography of 250 words
Statement about your work (2 pages max)
PDF document with work descriptions and captioned images (15 pages max) including links to media from YouTube, Vimeo and SoundCloud. Please title your files according to the following formulation: “your last name_your first name.”
Candidates are considered on merit, as well as on their application’s relevance to the aims of WHW Akademija. The Advisory Board selects an initial shortlist of candidates for interviews. Shortlisted applicants will be contacted for a Skype or in person (for those based in Zagreb) interview, conducted between May 20 – 31, 2019. Applicants will be notified of their status by middle of June.

Applicants must commit full-time to the assigned schedule. External engagements must be kept at an absolute minimum and should not interfere with attendance and participation in the program.

The program is open to applicants from all countries.

For additional questions, please contact whw@whw.hr

TUITION & FINANCIAL AID
WHW Akademija is tuition free. Participants will receive financial aid in the amount of 500 euro monthly to help offset the basic cost of living in Zagreb. Due to the high costs of living in Zagreb, however, participants will need to obtain additional funds for their living expenses. Participants are expected to find their own accommodation in Zagreb, with support provided by the WHW office.

WHW Akademija is funded by Kontakt Art Collection , ERSTE Foundation, Foundation for Arts Initiatives and Trust for Mutual Understanding. Additional funds for the public program have been granted by the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia and City Office for Culture, Education, and Sports of the City of Zagreb.

ABOUT THE PROFESSORS

Banu Cennetoğlu explores the political, social and cultural dimension of the production, representation and distribution of knowledge and asks how it feeds into a society’s collective thought and becomes part of its ideology. She lives and works in Istanbul, where, in 2016, she initiated BAS, a project space focusing on the collection and production of artists’ books and printed matter. In 2016, she was a guest at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Solo exhibitions include: Sculpture Center, New York (2019); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2018); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2015); Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest (2013); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2011). Selected group exhibitions include: “Stories of Almost Everyone,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); “The Restless Earth,” Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2017); 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014); Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010); 53rd Venice Biennale/Pavilion of Turkey (2009); 5th Berlin Biennale (2008); and 1st Athens Biennale and 10th Istanbul Biennial (both 2007).

The artistic research of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti is situated between politics, architecture, art, and pedagogy. In their practice, art exhibitions are both sites of display and sites of action that spill over into other contexts: built architectural structures, the shaping of critical learning environments, interventions that challenge dominant collective narratives, the production of new political imaginations, the formation of civic spaces and the re-definition of concepts. Together, Hilal and Petti are co-directors of DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), an architectural studio that explores the reuse, subversion, and profanation of actual structures of domination: from evacuated military bases to refugee camps, uncompleted governmental structures, or the remains of destroyed villages. In 2012, they initiated “Campus in Camps,” an experimental educational program hosted in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, with the aims to overcome conventional educational structures by creating a space for critical and grounded knowledge production (www.campusincamps.ps). Petti is currently a professor of Architecture and Social Justice at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, where Hilal has initiated the living room, a series of spaces of hospitality that have the potential to subvert the role of guest and host. Their latest book, published in 2018 by Art and Theory, is entitled Permanent Temporariness.

Sanja Iveković was born in Zagreb, Croatia, where she currently lives and works. She was raised in Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and belongs to the artistic generation covered by the umbrella term “New Art Practice”, that emerged after ’68. Iveković has continuously contested the role of art in society through a wide range of media, at the points of intersection between gender, nation and class. Her work from the 1990s deals with the collapse of socialist regimes and the consequences of the triumph of capitalism and the market economy over living conditions, particularly of women. She has participated in numerous international biennials and major exhibitions, such as the 38th EVA International Biennial, Limerick (2018); Documenta 8, 11, 12 and 13, 14 (1987, 2002, 2007, 2012, 2017); Kiev Biennial, Kiev (2015); Artes Mundi, Cardif (2014); and the Istanbul Biennial (2009, 2007). She has had solo exhibitions at DAAD Gallery, Berlin (2015); the South London Gallery/Calvert 22 (2012-2013); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2012); MAC/VAL, France (2012); MoMA, New York (2011); and the two-part exhibition at BAK, Utrecht, and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2009.)

David Maljković was born in Rijeka, Croatia. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Zagreb and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and is currently based in Berlin and Zagreb. Maljković’s work is a highly controlled variant exploitation of formalist concerns. While narrative is the driving element at the origination of a project, the artist’s varied means of visual implementation profoundly modifies and compromises its supremacy. The process of construction within a set of formal directives encrypts the narrative and postulates what Maljković describes as a new semantic logic. Virtually all of Maljkovic’s work is engaged with historical and technological markers that are characterized by situations both local and universal. In each, the erosion and corruption of memory are the subjects that are left for the viewer to re-organize. Among Maljković’s selected solo exhibitions are: The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014); Kunstmuseum Sankt Gallen (2014); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2013); GAMeC, Bergamo (2013); CAC Vilnius (2013); Sculpture Center, New York (2012); Kunsthalle Basel (2012); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2012, 2005); Secession, Vienna (2011); Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009); Whitechapel, London (2007); CAPC Musee d’art Contemporain, Bordeaux (2007); and MOMA PS1 (2007.) His work has been exhibited in museums such as Kunsthaus Bregenz; MAXXI Rome; MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon, Spain; The Power Plant, Toronto; Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. He has participated in numerous large-scale group shows, including the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016); 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015); La Triennale, Paris (2012); the 29th Sao Paulo Biennial (2010); 11th and 9th Istanbul Biennial (2009, 2007); the 4th Tirana Biennial (2009); and the 5th Berlin Biennale (2008), among others. His works are part of major public collections, such as Centre Pompidou, Paris; MUMOK, Vienna; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; MOMA, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Tate Collection, London.

Manuel Pelmuş was born in Bucharest, Romania. He is a choreographer and artist who lives and works in Oslo and Bucharest. Pelmuş could be seen as one of the protagonists of the “new performance turn,” artists who have been reimagining the role of performance in the context of visual arts. He often deploys continuous live presence within the context of exhibitions, using enactment as a strategy and the human body as a medium and a means to explore the body’s relationship to memory and the construction of history. In addition to his recent solo exhibition at Para Site, Hong Kong (2018), Pelmus’s projects have been featured at institutions including the Tate Modern, London; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Centre National de la Danse, Paris; TanzQuartier, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Tanz im August, Berlin; and the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, among others. In 2013, he represented Romania at the 55th Venice Biennale with a collaborative project with Alexandra Pirici. He has additionally participated in the Off-Biennale, Budapest (2017), and the Kyiv Biennale (2015). In 2012, Pelmus was awarded the Berlin Art Prize for performance arts and later recognized with the prize for excellence from the National Dance Center of Bucharest in 2015.

Kate Sutton is a writer currently based in Zagreb, Croatia, after nearly a decade in Russia, where she helped found the non-profit art space Baibakov Art Projects. As a curator, she helped bring artists like Paul Pfeiffer, Cyprien Gaillard, Latifa Echakhch, Wade Guyton and Luc Tuymans to Moscow, while also showcasing Russian artists including Ira Korina, Olga Chernysheva and Valery Chtak. In addition to writing for magazines including Artforum, Bidoun, Frieze, Ibraaz, and LEAP, and regularly contributing to artforum.com, she is now an international editor for Artforum. She has penned catalogue essays for artists including Nilbar Güreş, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Monica Bonvicini, Dorian Gaudin, Basim Magdy, Stefan Sava and Martin Roth. In 2013, she was recognized with an Art Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She has lectured and participated in various conferences and talks programs, organizing the Talks Program for the Vienna Contemporary in 2016 and 2017. Among her recent curatorial projects is “Nathalie Du Pasquier: Fair Game,” which was on view this winter at the International Centre for Graphic Arts in Ljubljana.

What, How & for Whom/WHW (Ivet Ćurlin Ana Dević, Nataša lić, Sabina Sabolović)

Proposals are invited for papers at the conference

In the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire? Art and Culture in Interwar Central Europe

Moravian Gallery, Brno

12 – 14 September 2019

The First World War is often held to have brought about not merely political and social disruption, but also a profound caesura in artistic and cultural life. Nowhere was this more evident than in Austria-Hungary, where Vienna and Budapest lost their pre-eminent status as cultural capitals, and the creation of new states transformed the political and artistic status of cities such as Prague, Brno, Salzburg and Košice. The disruption to artistic life was dramatically symbolised in the deaths in 1918 of some of the leading figures of pre-war modernism: Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt, Bohumil Kubišta and Egon Schiele.

Post-war nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire amongst writers such as Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig and Miklós Bánffy is well known and, as Marjorie Perloff has suggested, the collapse of Austria-Hungary left its imprint on what might termed a specific ‘austro-modernism.’ But what was the impact of the events of 1918 on the visual arts? How did artists, designers and architects negotiate the changed terrain of the post-war social and political world? To what extent did the memory of the Habsburg Empire continue to shape artistic life? To what extent did artists and architects actively seek to consign it to oblivion?

As part of the ERC-funded project Continuity / Rupture? Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918-1939 (https://craace.com) this conference examines the ways in which the visual arts shaped and were shaped by new aesthetic, political and ideological currents, with particular reference to Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Proposals (300 words) are invited for 30-minute papers that examine topics such as:

Cultural memory of the Habsburg Empire Formation and reformation of the avant-gardes Exile and migration The destruction, creation and renewal of artistic networks The art market, galleries, museums and other institutions of the art world Artistic, architectural and broader cultural policies of the new states Confirmed keynote speakers are: Pieter Judson (EUI, Florence); Eve Blau (Harvard University); Milena Bartlová (Academy of Art and Design, Prague) and Enikő Róka (Kiscelli Museum, Budapest).

The deadline for submission of proposals is Wednesday 1 May 2019. Submissions should be sent to: craace1918@outlook.com

2019 Shelter Festival (June 7-9, Helsinki, Finland) - Open Call for proposals!

Are you an artist, activist, educator, musician in the Helsinki area or beyond (Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Baltic Countries, Russia, etc.)? The Suoja/Shelter festival invites participants to propose projects the 2019 Shelter Festival: Cosmopolitics, Comradeship, and the Commons, a three-day convening for all those working at the intersection of deep ecology, climate resilience, environmental philosophy, ecofeminism, and socially engaged practice.

Proposals could take the form of media art, site-specific installations, performance art, and education, and should reflect on the themes of the 2019 Suoja/Shelter Festival. We encourage proposals that engage creatively and intersectionally with climate migration, gentrification, and tightening borders; forms of queer ecological activism and coalitions that oppose heteronormative agendas and address displacement, violence, food injustice, among others; mapping the ecology of education, from the point of view of recent theories and practices that propose the decolonization of knowledge, as well as that of land, air, and water.

If you are interested in planning to bring into focus these pressing issues within your artistic practice and communities, please submit a proposal for review by April 15, 2019 (23:59 CET).

With the support of the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland selected artists will receive an honorarium, production budget, and one-night accommodation in Helsinki.

To learn more: http://suojashelter.tilda.ws/artists_call_2019

Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe
Edited by J. Myers-Szupinska
Foreword by Kate Fowle
Published by ICI, 2019

Comradeship is a collection of essays by Zdenka Badovinac, the forward-thinking Slovenian curator, museum director, and scholar. Badovinac has been an influential voice in international conversations rethinking the geopolitics of art after the fall of communism, a ferocious critic of unequal negotiations between East and West, and a historian of the avant-garde art that emerged in socialist and post-socialist countries in the last century. She has been, moreover, an advocate for radical institutional forms: museums responsive to the complexities of the past and commensurate to the demands of the present.

Gathering writings from disparate and hard-to-find sources alongside new texts, this book offers an essential portrait of a major thinker and a crucial handbook of alternative approaches to curating and institution-building in the 21st century.

“Whip-smart, politically astute, curatorially inventive:
Zdenka Badovinac is nothing less than the most progressive and intellectually rigorous female museum director in Europe. This anthology includes key essays accompanying her series of brilliant exhibitions in Ljubljana and is essential reading for anyone interested in the differences between former east and former west. For anyone seeking curatorial alternatives to the neoliberal museum model of relentless expansion and dumbed- down blockbusters, Badovinac is a galvanizing inspiration.”
—Claire Bishop, art historian, and critic

About Zdenka Badovinac
Zdenka Badovinac is a curator and writer, who has served since 1993 as Director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, comprised since 2011 of two locations: the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova. In her work, Badovinac highlights the difficult processes of redefining history alongside different avant-garde traditions within contemporary art. Badovinac’s first exhibition to address these issues was Body and the East—From the 1960s to the Present (1998). She also initiated the first Eastern European art collection, Arteast 2000+. One her most important recent projects is NSK from Kapital to Capital: Neue Slowenische Kunst – The Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, Moderna galerija, 2015 (Traveled to Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, (2016), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2016) and the Museo Reina Sofía Madrid (2017)); NSK State Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017, co-curated with Charles Esche; The Heritage of 1989. Case Study: The Second Yugoslav Documents Exhibition, Modena galerija, Ljubljana, 2017, co-curated with Bojana Piškur; Sites of Sustainability Pavilions, Manifestos, and Crypts, Hello World. Revising a Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin; Heavenly Beings: Neither Human nor Animal, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, co-curated with Bojan Piškur, 2018; Badovinac was Slovenian Commissioner at the Venice Biennale from 1993 to 1997, 2005 and 2017, and Austrian Commissioner at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 2002 and the President of CIMAM, 2010–13.

Art and Commerce in Late Imperial Russia | The Peredvizhniki, a Partnership of Artists (Bloomsbury, 2019)
By Andrey Shabanov

Andrey Shabanov’s seminal reinterpretation of the Peredvizhniki is a comprehensive study that examines in-depth for the first time the organizational structure, self-representation, exhibitions, and critical reception of this 19th-century artistic partnership. Shabanov advances a more pragmatic reading of the Peredvizhniki, artists seeking professional and creative freedom in authoritarian Tsarist Russia. He likewise demonstrates and challenges how and why the group eventually came to be defined as a critically-minded Realist art movement. Unprecedentedly rich in new primary visual and textual sources, the book also connects afresh the Russian and Western art worlds of the period. A must-read for anyone interested in Russian art and culture, 19th-century European art, and also the history of art exhibitions, art movements, and the art market.

More information about the publication can be found here.