Dr Klara Kemp-Welch


course description


This new MA Option explores the experimental art scenes that developed, in parallel, in Communist Eastern Europe and under Latin American military dictatorships from the time of the death of Stalin and the beginning of the Cuban Revolution in 1953, to the dismantling of the Soviet ‘bloc’ in 1989-91. Countercultural activities designed to subvert censorship, challenge political orthodoxy, and to produce alternative models of local and trans-national solidarity will be our core concern as we analyse the moral encounter between alternative art and mechanisms of military and state repression in the USSR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, and the lively artistic exchanges and networks that developed among artists from these countries. Artists discussed will include: Robert Rehfeldt and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Tamas St. Auby, Gyorgy Galantai, Dora Maurer, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, KwieKulik, Julius Koller, Jiri Kovanda, Ilya Kabakov, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, Ana Mendiata, Roberto Jacoby, Paulo Brusky, Horacio Zabala, and Clemente Padin. We will work outwards from concrete examples towards social and political theory, exploring how artistic circles were embedded in complex global power structures and wider countercultural networks, cross referencing, among others, to liberation theology, and the writings of dissident figures such as Carlos Marighela, Vaclav Havel, and Jacek Kuron.


Fostering fresh approaches to modern and contemporary art history, the course explores critically the imperatives of art developed outside a market context, in relation to recent moves to recuperate this formerly invisible past by a delayed international audience, and the rapid museumification of East European and Latin American art and archives, globally, since the 1990s. Questions addressed will include the following: How might we draw parallels between formally similar practices without losing a sense of their ideological specificity? What categories and theories are most relevant in framing the heterogeneous inter-medial practices that developed in Eastern Europe and Latin America? How have East European and Latin American models of counterculture been interpreted and taken forward by leading theorists, such as Suely Rolnik, Ana Longoni, Andrzej Turowski, Boris Groys, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek? Should we now commit to producing, textually and curatorially, a new ‘global’ art history, beyond national and sub-regional frameworks? The course will equip students with necessary practical and methodological tools to develop individual research projects, encouraging them to take advantage of relevant archival holdings at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, the University of Essex, and Tate, among others.


language and other requirements


Standard entry requirements.  Reading knowledge of an East European language, Spanish or Portuguese, will be an advantage, but not a requirement.