[spectre] (fwd) East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe

[Andreas Broeckmann]

East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe
IRWIN (eds.)

ISBN 1-846380-22-7 (cloth)
ISBN 1-846380-05-7 (paper)
7.9 x 9.75,
500 pp., 192 colour illus.


East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe surveys the 
extraordinary artistic landscape of the eastern half of the European 
continent. It is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct some of the 
hidden histories of contemporary art and offers compelling 
discoveries for readers based both outside and within these 
geographic limits. The Slovenian artists’ group IRWIN, who initiated 
the concept of East Art Map, has invited artists, curators, theorists 
and critics to record a wide range of innovations and radical actions 
that have taken place in the region since 1945. Despite its 
substantial contribution to a new art history, this book also remains 
an artists’ project, with a subjective and quixotic appeal in 
addition to its informative contents.

In recent decades, Eastern Europe has undergone rapid changes in its 
political and economic dogmas and it is now among the most 
significant areas for the production of contemporary culture. East 
Art Map tells the region’s compelling histories in different ways, 
based on a selection of key artworks and artists. For the first time 
over such a broad terrain, the less celebrated sector of Europe talks 
to us on its own terms about its past and its future.

Not only does East Art Map serve as a guidebook through the visual 
culture of totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies, it is the 
largest contemporary art documentation project ever undertaken by the 
East on the East. ‘Where history is not given,’ the editors write, 
‘it has to be constructed.’ This book is that construction.

The IRWIN group consists of five artists: Dusan Mandic, Miran Mohar, 
Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek and Borut Vogelnik. The group was 
founded in 1983 in Ljubljana and was also co-founder of Neue 
Slowenische Kunst (NSK). Alongside other activities, IRWIN have been 
engaged in a series of projects which have actively and concretely 
intervened in social and historical contexts in the decade that 
redefined the status of art in Eastern Europe (Kapital, NSK Embassy 
Moscow, Transnacionala, East Art Map). The first three of these 
projects resulted in books edited by Eda Cufer, who started to 
collaborate with IRWIN at the beginning of the 1990s. IRWIN is also 
involved in the creation of three art collections in Eastern Europe.

Afterall Books are distributed by The MIT Press, and can be ordered 
via the website:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/afterall

For further information on Afterall please see:
http://www.afterall.org/

For further information on East Art Map please see:
<
http://www.eastartmap.org>http://www.eastartmap.org