Notes on Contributors
Justyna Balisz-Schmelz
Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Department of the History of Modern Art at the Institute of Art History of the University of Warsaw. She studied art history at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Humboldt University, and Freie Universität in Berlin. Her previous research focused on German post-1945 art within the context of cultural memory studies and German-Polish artistic relations. She is the author of the book Przeszłość niepokonana. Sztuka niemiecka po 1945 jako przestrzeń i medium pamięci [The Unsourmountable Past: The German Post-1945 Art as the Space and Medium of Memory, Kraków, Universitas, 2018]. She has published papers in historical and art historical journals, contributed to collected volumes, and authored numerous essays in exhibition catalogues. Her recent research explores alternative spirituality in East and West German post-war art. She is also working on a monograph on the Silesian artist Urszula Broll. She is a co-author and the principal co-investigator for the research project Alternative Forms of Spirituality in Polish Art 1945–1989, funded by the National Science Center (2024–2028).
Jakub Banasiak
Ph.D., is an art historian and art critic working as an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw of the Faculty of Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies. He is the author of the book Proteus Times. The Decay of the State Art System 1982–1993 (2020), which earned him a Jan Długosz Award nomination. He is a member of the editorial board of the academic journal Miejsce and editor-in-chief (with Karolina Plinta) of Szum art magazine. He focuses, among others, on the art of the new spirituality in the postcommunist transition era. Recently, he curated an exhibition titled Tectonic Movements at the Museum of Art in Łódź (2022), where he presented the results of his research. He is currently finalizing a book on the same subject.
Zlatina Bogdanova
is a senior assistant professor at the Ethnology of Socialism and Post-socialism Department at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with the Ethnographic Museum at Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She earned her doctoral degree in ethnology from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg with the thesis Studying the Processes of Exclusion and Inclusion in Rural Bulgaria: The Significance of Kinship and Social Networks. She holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology of Southeastern Europe from the Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. She has published studies in the fields of urban anthropology, cultural policies and heritage, creative industries, and districts.
Kamila Dworniczak
Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Department of Art Theory at the Institute of Art History of the University of Warsaw. Her scientific interests focus primarily on the cultural history of photography, postwar art criticism, and intermedia practices in contemporary art. She is the author of the book Rodzina człowiecza. Recepcja wystawy ‘The Family of Man’ w Polsce a humanistyczny paradygmat fotografii [Rodzina człowiecza. Reception of the Exhibition ‘The Family of Man’ and the Humanist Paradigm of Photography] (2021) and editor of several anthologies of source texts devoted to the history of photography in Poland. She is the principal investigator for the research project Alternative Forms of Spirituality in Polish Art 1945–1989, funded by the National Science Center (2024–2028), in which she studies the significance of spirituality for the understanding of postwar realism and the relationship between word and image in spirituality-based artistic practices.
Nadežda Elezović
Ph.D., is an assistant at the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka. The field of her scientific interest is contemporary art history and art theory. She received her Ph.D. in Art History, focusing on (meta)spiritual art in the second half of the twentieth century.
Martin Jemelka
is a Czech historian and music journalist specializing in the social, economic and religious history of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially the history of workers, housing and everyday life, historical demography, cultural history, and the history of the Bata concern. He is the author and co-author of more than a dozen monographs and numerous studies in domestic and foreign publications and periodicals. His most recent monographs and studies were devoted to the religious life of industrial workers in Czechia and the phenomenon of spiritualism and the spiritist movement in Czech Silesia in the first half of the 20th century.
Marta Kudelska
is a curator and art critic. In 2023, she obtained her Ph.D. in Art Sciences at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. In her curatorial and research practice, she is interested in issues related primarily to the relationship of contemporary art and magic, horror, the occult and esotericism, as well as curatorial strategies and emerging art. She is currently researching the relationship between black romanticism and contemporary art. She works at the Department of Contemporary Culture at the Institute of Culture of the Jagiellonian University and is a member of the Polish Section of the International Association of Art Critics AICA.
Andres Kurg
is a professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Institute of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. His academic work specializes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, with a focus on the influence of technological transformations and changes in everyday life on architecture from the 1960s to the 1980s. He has published articles in architecture and art magazines (AAFiles, ARTMargins, Journal of Architecture, Home Cultures) and contributed to several collected volumes and exhibition catalogues. He has held guest fellowships at the Getty Research Institute, Yale University, and Friedrich Schiller University Jena.
Emese Kürti
Ph.D., is an art historian and researcher, head of the Artpool Art Research Center and deputy director of research at the Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI) within the framework of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. Previously, she was a lecturer at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and the Central European University, a researcher of the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, and head of the private research site, asb Research Lab. She is a member of the Hungarian Section of AICA and of the NEP4Dissent international research network. Her research focuses on neo-avant-garde art practices in Hungary, Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia, including fluxus, action art, experimental poetry, performance, as well as minority and women’s issues.
Mari Laanemets
Ph.D., is a senior researcher at the Institute of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Her research focuses on 1960s and 1970s art in the Soviet Union and its intersections with architecture and design practices, postwar abstractionism, and the aesthetics of modernization in Eastern Europe. She studied art history at the Estonian Academy of Arts and earned her Ph.D. from the Institute of Art History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She has published several articles and essays (on artists such as Leonhard Lapin, Mladen Stilinović, and Sirje Runge) and has curated a number of exhibitions.
Jarosław Lubiak
Ph.D., is a curator of contemporary art exhibitions, lecturer, head of the Department of Art History and Theory at the Academy of Art in Szczecin, and, from 2014–2019, he was deputy director for the program at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. He is the author of one of the first artistic and research programs in Poland devoted to the climate and environmental catastrophe – Plasticity of the Planet – at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in 2019. He was the curator of international and national exhibitions such as Vital Realism of the Koło Klipsa Group (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2014–2015) or The State of Life: Polish Contemporary Art within the Global Context (National Art Museum of China, Beijing 2015). He is the editor of publications and author of scientific articles and critical texts.
Stella Pelše
is a leading researcher at the Art Academy of Latvia Institute of Art History. Her research interests include art theory, history and criticism, aesthetics, and contemporary art. She is one of the contributors to the books Reinterpreting the Past: Traditionalist Artistic Trends in Central and Eastern Europe of the 1920s and 1930s (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2010), Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2012), and State Construction and Art in East Central Europe, 1918–2018 (London: Routledge, 2022), and one of the principal authors and translator in the multi-volume project Art History of Latvia launched in 2013.
Ileana Pintilie
is an art critic and historian, professor at the Faculty of Arts at the West University of Timişoara, an independent curator, AICA member, and was a member of the ARTMargins journal board from 2000 to 2010. She is the author of many articles, chapters in collective volumes (Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere. Event-based in Late Socialist Europe, London: Routledge, 2018) and books about Romanian and Central European modern and contemporary art, among others on Actionism in Romania during Communism (Idea, Cluj, 2000) and many studies on Ştefan Bertalan. She was the curator of several projects like the Zone performance festival in Timişoara (1993–2002) and numerous other contemporary art exhibitions and was the curator for Romania of several international projects, e.g., Body and the East (Ljubljana, 1998), Shaping the Great City (Prague, Vienna and Getty Museum, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, 1999–2001), and Dan Perjovschi. Chalk Reality (CAM Vojvodina, Novi Sad 2010).
Bohdan Pylypushko
(born in 1990 in Sumy, Ukraine) is an artist and art historian living in Warsaw. His study focuses on inner emigration and unofficial culture in Soviet Ukraine and the research perspectives of art methodology in relation to literary theory and texts of culture. He received his master’s degree from the Ukrainian Academy of Printing in Lviv (2013) and a Ph.D. in Art History from the Modern Art Research Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts in Kyiv (2019). He was awarded the Gaude Polonia Fellowship (Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw) and the Scholarship for Young Scientists (Jagiellonian University, Kraków).
Nemanja Radulović
is a full professor at the Department of Serbian Literature and South Slavic Literatures (Faculty of Philology, Belgrade University). He researches esotericism in Serbian culture, especially in literature. He is a member of the ESSWE board (European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism), a member of the central committee of CEENASWE (Central and Eastern European Network for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism), and coordinator of ESOLIT (the Esotericism and Literature network) (both operating within ESSWE). His edited volumes (in English) include Esotericism, Literature and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe (Belgrade: Faculty of Philology, 2018); Studies of Western Esotericism in Central and Eastern Europe (together with K. M. Hess) (Szeged: JATEPress, University of Szeged, 2019); and Disenchantment, Re-enchantment and Folklore Genres (together with S. Djordjević Belić) (Belgrade: Institute for Literature and Arts, 2021).
Ingrid Ruudi
is a senior researcher and visiting associate at the Estonian Academy of Arts of the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture. In 2020, she defended her Ph.D. at the Estonian Academy of Arts with a dissertation titled Spaces of the Interregnum. Transformations in Estonian Architecture and Art, 1986–1994 (cum laude) and spent 2022 as a Juris Padegs postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. Her research interests encompass late and post-Soviet spatial practices, intersections of architecture and art, architecture as a social and political agent, and gender studies in architecture. She has curated a number of research exhibitions and has been the editor-in-chief of the Estonian art history journal Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi/Studies on Art and Architecture since 2021.
Eva Skopalová
has been a curator in the Post-1945 Art Collection at the National Gallery in Prague since 2021. Recently, she cocurated the permanent exhibition of postwar art 1939–2021: The End of the Black and White Era at the Trade Fair Palace of the National Gallery in Prague, where she worked on the period 1939–1963. At the same time, she is working on a critical reflection and treatment of art in exile and filling this “gap” in the collection. Methodologically, her research focuses on the problem of nonlinear time in art history. Her studies were supported by a fellowship at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and a Fulbright Fellowship at New York University, Institute of Fine Arts (2018–2019). She has also applied these methodological approaches in the exhibition projects.
Karel Srp
(1958) is an art historian and curator who specializes in 19th- and 20th-century art history and current trends. He is the author and co-author of many books and exhibitions about leading figures of Czech art of the last century (including Jan Zrzavý, Rudolf Kremlička, Vojtěch Preissig, Vladimír Janoušek, Václav Boštík, Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský, Karel Malich, Emila Medková, and Mikuláš Medek). He dedicated several books to František Kupka, whose work he is consistently interested in. His latest book is dedicated to Jean-Paul Sartre and his influence on Czech culture in the years 1934–1970. He is currently interested in the reception of Pablo Picasso’s work in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War.
Agata Stronciwilk
is an assistant professor at the Institute of Art Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice. In 2019, she received a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of Silesia in Katowice. She also worked at the Education Department at the Silesian Museum in Katowice, focusing on Polish art from the 19th to the 21st century and Upper Silesian cultural heritage. She was awarded a Fulbright Slavic Award for the year 2022/2023 (University of Washington in Seattle) and received a scholarship at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton (Canada).
Erzsébet Tatai
Ph.D., is an art historian, living and working in Budapest (Hungary) as a senior research fellow at the Institute of Art History of the Hungarian Research Network (HUN-REN). She was the chief curator of Kunsthalle Budapest and director of the Bartók 32 Gallery in Budapest, as well as the editor of the Enciklopédia Publishing House and Fine Art Publishing House. She is the co-editor of Conceptual Art at the Turn of Millenium. Konceptuálne umenie na zlome tisícroči. Konceptuális művészet az ezredfordulón, along with Jana Geržová (Budapest – Bratislava, 2002). She has published books on neoconceptual art in Hungary in the 1990s (Neokonceptuális művészet Magyarországon a kilencvenes években, Budapest, 2005), environmental culture for teachers (Környezetkultúra. Tanári kézikönyv, with Mária Tatai, Budapest, 1994), an introduction to the history of art (Művészettörténeti ismeretek, Budapest, 2002), and artists monographs (Koronczi Endre, 2014; Marianne Csáky, 2015; Szabics Ágnes, 2020).
Łukasz Żuchowski
is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw, where he completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Currently, he is working on his dissertation on Xawery Dunikowski and the issues of the fourth dimension in Polish modernist and avant-garde art under the supervision of Prof. Iwona Luba. His main interests include modern sculpture, art and science in modern and contemporary contexts. He has published articles with the National Museum in Warsaw and the University of Warsaw. He received the Joseph Conrad Fellowship and is currently the head of the NCN PRELUDIUM 22 grant.
Rasa Žukienė
is an art historian who studies 20th century Lithuanian and Eastern European art. Her main fields of research are the work of M. K. Čiurlionis in the context of European art and the culture of the Lithuanian diaspora in Western countries from World War II until the present day. She is currently a professor at Vytautas Magnus University.