The Art and Politics of Transnational Memory Practices in Eastern Europe

Abstract

This panel seeks to critically discuss visual arts practices that engage with the entangled pasts at work in Eastern Europe, including the Holocaust and the communist regimes. It emphasises what commonplaces exist in artistic practices and how artists recall and critically address these traumatic pasts in their artworks 30 years after the transitions to democracy. We argue there are transnational artistic discourses that can be identified and which, studied together, can shed more light on common strategies at work in the countries of the region. The panel uses an interdisciplinary approach, that of art and politics, to look at the way societies, as seen by artists, deal with their past experiences. Additionally, we use the lens of transnational memory to address the common issues, as well as the differences between the national cases. Through the study of dissimilar objects of study, which include daily life museums of communism, performative practices around erased Holocaust memory sites sites, queer visual memories of communism and visual memories of informal practices, we will approach the issue of a transnational memory of traumatic experiences in Eastern Europe.