IAS Book Launch: Special Issue of ARTMargins on the Socialist Anthropocene

ABOUT THE SPECIAL ISSUEThis special issue spanning ARTMargins Online and ARTMargins Print journal is the fruit of the ERC/UKRI supported research project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA), led by Maja Fowkes at the IAS Postsocialist Art Centre since 2022. The assembled findings investigate the records of the transformation of nature in socialist art history by discussing artworks that disclose the environmental impacts of the system’s extractivist, infrastructural, and terraforming interventions in the natural world. They also locate within socialist-era art practices the voicing of an ecological critique of the irredeemable costs of such progress-oriented development.

The contributions of contemporary artists finetune the optics for apprehending these exorbitant histories to reveal their multiscalar, transtemporal, geoengineered, and beyond-human dimensions that still shape the environment today. Across scholarly articles, artistic projects, a review, interview, commentary and roundtable, the contributors to this special issue are: Aïda Adilbek, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Jakub Gawkowski, Dimitra Gkitsa, Saodat Ismailova, Aziza Kadyri, Aigerim Kapar, Karolina Kolenda, Marie Meyerding, Anel Rakhimzhanova, Dilda Ramazan, Rita Süveges, Mia Yu and Anna Zett. For access to the online materials and links to the contents of the print journal, see: https://artmargins.com/

ABOUT THE EVENTJoin editors Maja and Reuben Fowkes for a presentation of the special issue on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts in ARTMargins. This will be followed by a conversation with invited respondents and an opportunity for informal exchange.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies. They work on the twentieth-century art history of socialism from Eastern Europe to Central Asia and contemporary artistic engagements with ecology, climate and the Anthropocene. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and East European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), a special issue of Third Text guest-edited by Reuben on the “Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism” (2018) and Maja’s monograph The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015).Their curated exhibitions include “Colliding Epistemes” at Bozar Brussels (2022) and “Potential Agrarianisms” at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021), and they led the Getty Foundation project Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History (2018-22). They publish extensively in peer-reviewed journals, edited books, exhibition catalogues and on contemporary art platforms including Art Monthly, Texte zur Kunst and Springerin, and they co-host the SAVA podcast Left to be Desired.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA)SAVA is a visual arts led interdisciplinary research project that challenges the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene by asserting the constitutive role of the environmental histories of Socialism in the formation of the new geological age. Led by Dr. Maja Fowkes at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, the project was selected for a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) and is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

ARTMarginsARTMargins Print is a peer-reviewed tri-quarterly journal published by the MIT Press that publishes material related to the histories of twentieth-century and contemporary art, art theory, art institutions, and curatorship. It places special emphasis on marginal histories and innovative critical and methodological perspectives. ARTMargins Online publishes interviews, essays, reviews, and podcasts that analyze postwar and contemporary art of East-Central Europe in a global setting.