CfP: Artistic re-enactments as Vehicles of Cultural Transfer in Eastern European Performance Art

AAH2016 Annual Conference and Bookfair
University of Edinburgh
7 - 9 April 2016


Artistic Re-enactments as Vehicles of Cultural Transfer in Eastern European Performance Art, 1960–present

Convenor:

Amy Bryzgel, University of Aberdeen, a.bryzgel@abdn.ac.uk

The re-enactment of artistic performances and actions is a topic that has garnered much attention in recent years, most notably catalogued in Amelia Jones’ and Adrian Heathfield’s substantial publication Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (2012). Given the fact that, in many cases, artistic transfer from one generation to the next did not occur in the traditional manner – through the academies – in Eastern Europe, re-enactments of artistic performance can function, in the region, as a witness to the forgotten past, functioning as a vehicle of cultural memory. Additionally, it can facilitate the transfer of ideas, history and practice from one generation to the next.

This panel invites papers that discuss artistic re-enactments of performances from across the former communist and socialist countries of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe in recent artistic practice. The papers in the panel should interrogate some of the following questions: What are the various functions of artistic re-enactments of performances in Eastern Europe? How do these functions compare with current understandings of re-enactment in the West? How can re-enactments be used to access a lost or inaccessible history (such as performance art in Eastern Europe)? Also welcome are papers that consider revisiting culturally relevant or historically significant places by artists or within the context of artistic re-enactments.

Email paper propsals to the session convenor(s) by 9 November 2015. Download a Paper Proposal Guidelines