Klara Kemp-Welch: Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe, 1965-1981

Over the course of the 1970s, a series of creative initiatives by artists, art historians, and critics, centered in places like Budapest, Poznań, and Prague, produced a network that bridged the East-West divide, and the no less rigid divides between the countries of the Eastern bloc. Klara Kemp-Welch presents material from her new book Networking the Bloc, documenting the elaborate web of artistic connectivity that came about through personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges over the course of the period 1965-1981 in Eastern Europe. Countering the conventional Cold War narrative of Eastern bloc isolation, she explores how artistic ideas were relayed among like-minded artists across ideological boundaries and national frontiers.