Eastern Europe and the Decolonization of Art History
Session will present: On locationAffiliated Society or Committee Name: Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
This panel brings together emerging scholarship that reconsiders Eastern Europe through the lens of decolonization, with a particular focus on Ukraine and the broader imperial entanglements of the region. Challenging dominant narratives that have long positioned Eastern Europe as peripheral, passive, or derivative, the four papers engage diverse media—from nineteenth-century academic painting and early photography to contemporary conceptual art and wartime visual culture. Together, they ask what it means to decolonize art history in and through Eastern Europe: to reframe inherited representations, reclaim marginal archives, and interrogate the geopolitical assumptions that underlie canonical narratives. Topics include the visual neutralization of gender in representations of war in contemporary Ukraine; the aestheticization of the Ukrainian steppe in the service of Polish and German imperial mythologies; the racial logic embedded in photographic portrayals of Siberia under Russian rule; and the site-specific conceptual practices of Odesa-based artists responding to the Black Sea as a lived and imagined geography. Grounded in original research and informed by critical methodologies, these papers demonstrate that Eastern Europe is not merely the object of imperial vision, but a generative site for rethinking the politics, geographies, and vocabularies of art history itself.
Keywords:
Geographic Area: Eastern Europe
Topics: Decolonization
Topics: Socially Engaged Art
Topics: Politics
Topics: Contemporary
Chair:
Tomasz Grusiecki, Boise State University
Abstract Submissions Closed
