CFP: Polish Avant-garde in Berlin (Berlin, 14-15 Dec 17)

Polish Avant-garde in Berlin

Conference on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Polish avant-garde movement
Deadline: Jul 30, 2017

The conference is part of the festivities on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Polish avant-garde movement that is being celebrated in Poland throughout 2017. Thematically, it comprises the relations between Polish artists of the avant-garde movement and their Berlin counterparts in the first decades of the 20th century until present time.

Berlin is one of the key places on the cultural map of transnational avant-garde movements. It brought and continues to bring together artists of different nationalities, beliefs and cultures, among them (visual) artists, writers, poets, musicians, performing artists (theatre), collectors, and art critics. During the first three decades of the 20th century, the Berlin art scene was coined by the works of such artists as Stanisław Przybyszewski, the founders and members of the Poznan-based group BUNT, the members of the groups BLOK and Formiści (Formists), innovative art theorists, poets and writers (Tadeusz Peiper and Aleksander Wat) as well as already classical avant-garde artists of international renown such as Henryk Berlewi and Teresa Żarnowerówna. They were active members of the Berlin avant-garde movement, they were inspired by it just as well as they brought with themselves new, thus far unknown ideas and perspectives to west-European cultures with regard to both form and iconography.

Polish artists continued to participate in the Berlin art scene even after the Second World War, they worked and lived in Berlin and presented their works – amongst others – on the Berlin Biennale. Here, names of well-known artists need to be mentioned such as Katarzyna Kozyra, Jerzy Kosałka, Paweł Althamer, Wilhelm Sasnal or Artur Żmijewski, curator of the seventh Biennale.

The conference does not limit itself to topics from art history; instead we would like to encourage interested scholars from different fields to submit papers from literature, theatre, music and film studies. Furthermore, the research questions do not require to be chronologically confined.
With regard to the interdisciplinary understanding of the paradigm of the Polish avant-garde movement in Berlin, we would like to examine the following problems and research questions in particular:
– processes and causes that enabled the presence of representatives of the Polish avant-garde movement in Berlin, such as the influence of political events or social and cultural changes
– transfer, influence, adoption, rejection or modification of artistic ideas
– contacts between German and Polish artists, their social and cultural backgrounds
– participation of Polish avant-garde artists in exhibitions, concerts and presentations
– German-Polish (Berlin) artist groups
– the reception of Polish avant-garde art in Berlin by art critics, the press and the public
– Polish avant-garde in light of the Berlin art market
– can avant-garde art function as a carrier of national and cultural distinctiveness, es-pecially abroad, or does it aspire a more universal, transnational form?

Please submit your paper proposals as abstracts (250 words) in English or German along with a short academic CV until July 30th, 2017, to: malgorzata.stolarska-fronia@cbh.pan.pl
The conference will be held in German and English (no translation provided), and is preliminarily scheduled for December 14th-15th, 2017.

Reference:
CFP: Polish Avant-garde in Berlin (Berlin, 14-15 Dec 17). In: H-ArtHist, Mar 31, 2017 (accessed Apr 3, 2017).