ERSTE Foundation
PATTERNS_Travelling Lecture Set

This series of lectures aims at bringing and connecting eminent authors to the Universities in Central and South-Eastern Europe. Noteworthy research and methods will be brought to the universities and innovative approaches with regard to content and methodology will be applied to existing courses.
It is an initiative by ERSTE Foundation. The theme and list of participants has been compiled by Piotr Piotrowski in agreement with the culture programme of ERSTE Foundation and the PATTERNS Advisory Panel.

PATTERNS Advisory Panel: Cosmin Costinas (author and curator, Bucharest / Vienna), Veronica Kaup-Hasler (director of Steirischer Herbst, Graz), Piotr Piotrowski (art historian, Poznan) and Georg Schöllhammer (editor of Springerin and documenta 12 magazines, Vienna).

ERSTE Foundation: Christine Böhler, Christiane Erharter


PATTERNS_Travelling Lecture Set 2008/2009
Writing Central European Art History

"The lectures will focus on theoretical and methodological questions in order to confront very different approaches proposed by scholars coming from different experiences, with the central focus remaining on Central and Southern East European art. The main and common point of departure will be a relationship between East and West in which the East would not be recognized as the (real) Other (as for example Asian culture), but rather as the close-Other or not-the-real-Other. It applies both to the art production (ie. the subject of art historical analysis)-since Central and Southern East European art has been done in the light of the Western one-as well as analytical language, considering our methods have also been 'borrowed' from the Western theories.

For scholars who are working on Central and Southern East European art history, particularly that of modern and contemporary, it is quite obvious that this sort of writing should differ from art history of other regions, particularly from a Western art historical narrative. On the other hand, to construct Central and Southern East European art history without Western references seems to be impossible. Thus, this sort of scholarship is somehow 'hanging' between Western models, understood both as historical influences over regional art and as methods coming from the master narrative, which is of course Western by origins."

Compiled by Piotr Piotrowski and ERSTE Foundation