[spectre] CFP: Modernism's Future Pasts: Abstraction and Identity in 'East-Central Europe'

[Andreas Broeckmann LEU]

From: Katia Denysova
Date: Feb 6, 2025
Subject: CFP: Modernism's Future Pasts: Abstraction and Identity in 
'East-Central Europe'

University of Tübingen & Across East-Central Europe, Oct 1, 2025–Feb 3, 2026
Deadline: Mar 10, 2025

Call for Participants | Modernism’s Future Pasts: Abstraction and 
Identity in ‘East-Central Europe’, 1910–1930s | Getty Connecting Art 
Histories Project 2025–27.

The Kunsthistorisches Institut at the University of Tübingen, with 
support from the Getty’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, is 
launching a new research project ‘Modernism’s Future Pasts: Abstraction 
and Identity in “East-Central Europe”, 1910–1930s’. Early and mid-career 
researchers and curators are encouraged to apply to participate in the 
project over 2025–27.

Led by Prof. Megan R. Luke and Dr Katia Denysova, the project aims to 
re-contextualize modernist art and its historiography by examining and 
critically reassessing the entrenched polarity between the perceived 
nationalism of folk practices and the universalism of the historical 
avant-garde in East-Central Europe. The engagement with the history of 
ethnography in this region holds enormous potential for how the 
discipline at large contends with tensions between anticipation and 
anachronism in the study of culture more broadly. By focusing on the 
emergence of abstract art and design, the project seeks to explore the 
link between non-representational visual practices and folk and 
decorative art traditions in the region of study.

The project will surface a network of 12−15 early and mid-career 
researchers and curators of early twentieth-century art and visual 
culture in the European countries of the former Eastern bloc and the 
Soviet Union. This group will build on extant research in a series of 
travelling seminars to take place across four locations: Prague/Brno, 
Łódź/Poznań, Kyiv/Lviv (hybrid format, potentially to be hosted in 
Estonia), and a winter school at the University of Tübingen. In each 
seminar, participants will work together to take art historical 
methodologies beyond the national historiographies that continue to 
restrict the broader reception of scholarship generated in the region, 
reinvesting in the study of transnational exchanges and relationships 
among historical agents active in East-Central Europe between the 1910s, 
when the first abstract artworks started to appear across the European 
continent, and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, with the 
subsequent ideological and aesthetic conformism of Soviet communism that 
overshadowed this region.

The project strives to generate an increased international appreciation 
of the heterogeneity of the region’s modernist artistic practices and 
institutional structures while fostering a greater mutual understanding 
of academic cultures within the region and beyond. The network will work 
to bridge the existing divide between the two sub-regions that have 
structured the study of abstract art and design in this cultural space: 
the former republics of the USSR and its satellite states. Furthermore, 
the scholarship generated in the context of this project will aim to 
move beyond the discourses and theoretical frameworks imported from 
Western Europe and North America towards developing context-bound 
terminologies and methods.

In each of the four locations, the network will gather for a week-long 
session of reading discussions, research presentations and engagement 
with relevant institutions. Collection visits will concentrate on the 
artworks, artists, and groups active during the period under 
consideration to engender new perspectives on their practices and the 
historical context. The topics of each session will draw on the 
strengths of art production in the host city/country while also 
stimulating comparative analysis vis-à-vis other geographies in the 
region. We expect the participants to engage actively in meetings and 
discussions and give 1-2 research papers or presentations during the 
project, with all travel and accommodation expenses covered. Applicants 
based overseas/beyond the region of study should contact project leaders 
about funding limits.

We seek applications from PhD candidates at an advanced stage of their 
programme, postdoctoral researchers, early career scholars and curators 
from the countries of East-Central Europe, as well as from those who 
study the region’s art history and visual culture from further afield.

All expenses associated with their travel within the project will be 
covered.

To apply, please submit a single pdf document with: 1. Your full name, 
email address, professional title/position, institutional affiliation, 
country of citizenship, and city and country of residence. 2. A 
statement of intent (max. two pages) indicating what you would bring to 
the project, the nature of your current work and involvement with the 
early twentieth-century East-Central European art history/visual 
culture, and how your research would benefit from your participation in 
the programme.
3. A short CV (max. three pages) with a selection of your most relevant 
publications and research or curatorial projects.
4. For PhD candidates only: a brief letter of support from your doctoral 
supervisor confirming that you are expected to submit your thesis by the 
summer of 2027.

The project team comprising Professor Megan R. Luke (University of 
Tübingen), Andrij Bojarov (independent researcher, artist and curator), 
Daniel Muzyczuk (Interim Director, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź), Professor 
Matthew Rampley (Masaryk University, Brno), Professor Michael White 
(University of York), and Dr Katia Denysova (University of Tübingen) 
will select the participants.

Please submit your application to Megan Luke 
(megan.luke at uni-tuebingen.de) and Katia Denysova 
(kateryna.denysova at uni-tuebingen.de) by 11.59 pm CET on Monday, March 
10. We are happy to answer your enquiries about the project or 
application process and will notify applicants of the outcome by mid-April.

This project is made possible with support from Getty through its 
Connecting Art Histories initiative.


Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Modernism’s Future Pasts: Abstraction and Identity in ‘East-Central 
Europe’. In: ArtHist.net, Feb 6, 2025. <https://arthist.net/archive/43865>.