The Princeton-Warsaw Symposium on Eastern European Art and Architecture
We are delighted to host virtually the Princeton-Warsaw Symposium on Eastern European Art and Architecture, Proxy and Interstice: Mediating Spaces in Early Modern Central/Eastern Europe, on Thursday 18 March, from 9am to 3 pm, ET.
While current critical reexaminations of colonial legacies within academia have engendered prominent debates on the possibilities of writing ‘global art history’, their impact on scholarship on Eastern European art and architecture still remains limited. In questioning the prominence of the centre-periphery explanatory model, discourses regarding transnationalism, hybrid identities, and cross-cultural encounters remain restricted to specific, predominantly (post)modern, case studies, many of which were inspired by Piotr Piotrowski’s influential call for writing ‘horizontal art history’. Nevertheless, his emphasis on tracing global connectedness finds its counterpart in the region’s centuries-long social and cultural heterogeneity, with some of its most striking manifestations to be found in the heterodox artistic production of the Early Modern period. Far from a mere ‘where East meets West’ commonplace, Central/Eastern Europe constitutes a site of a dynamic negotiation interweaving Oriental and Occidental models, so reflecting and acting upon the contradictory social dynamics underlying the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburg empire and their porous borderlands. In this process architecture played a prominent role, both by structuring the sociable tenets of such encounters, and by providing a platform for artistic merging in its very production. Our symposium aims to reappraise these insufficiently appreciated interpretative potentialities by exploring Eastern European architecture as a space of mediation, both on the levels of representation and social practice. In revisiting the questions of orientalism, patronage, and temporality, this approach will help explore architecture’s power to serve as both proxy and interstice: to simultaneously bridge and establish boundaries across cultures, periods and beyond.
Organizers: Dr hab. Barbara Arciszewska (University of Warsaw) & Aleksnader Musiał (Princeton University)