The Cold War was an overriding force that profoundly shaped the conditions under which artists, curators, and cultural institutions could establish and maintain international contacts. While the global landscape was complex, the metaphor of the Iron Curtain embedded itself deeply in the popular imagination and carried tangible consequences for both mobility and communication. Yet, as demonstrated by recent scholarship (e.g., Curley 2019; Franke et al. 2021; Wille 2025), framing the overall situation in strictly bipolar terms is overly reductive; although elaborate webs of connection were limited and certain artistic practices were either, informal diplomacy, and acts of solidarity, they developed channels that blurred rigid distinctions such as East and West or official and unofficial, generating cultural spaces far more nuanced than dominant Cold War narratives imply.
This one-day doctoral conference seeks to explore how transnational artistic relations unfolded in the visual arts between 1945 and 1989. Rather than focusing primarily on restrictions and bureaucratic barriers, we encourage contributions that illuminate the situations in which artists, artworks, exhibitions, or curators did cross the geopolitical and ideological boundaries of the Cold War – sometimes officially, sometimes semi-legally, sometimes unexpectedly – and that examine how these encounters shaped artistic practices and institutional narratives.
Doctoral Conference at the Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague in cooperation with the Academic Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and Palacký University, Olomouc. The conference is organized in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and Palacký University in Olomouc.
Application deadline: April 30, 2026
For additional information, visit: www.udu.cas.cz/en/akce/transnational-artistic-relations-in-the-cold-war-era
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