East Art Map
Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe

Edited by IRWIN

East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe surveys the extraordinary artistic landscape of the eastern half of the European continent. It is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct some of the hidden histories of contemporary art and offers some compelling discoveries for readers based both outside and within these geographic limits. The Slovenian artist group Irwin, who initiated the concept of East Art Map, have invited artists, curators, theorists and critics to record a wide range of innovations and radical actions that have taken place in the region since 1945. Despite its substantial contribution to a new art history, this book also remains an artists' project, with a subjective and quixotic appeal in addition to its informative contents. In recent decades Eastern Europe has undergone rapid changes in its political and economic dogmas and it is now among the most significant areas for the production of contemporary culture. East Art Map tells the region's compelling histories in different ways, based on a selection of key artworks and artists. For the first time over such a broad terrain, the less celebrated sector of Europe talks to us on its own terms about its past and its future. Not only does East Art Map serve as a guidebook through the visual culture of totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies, it is the largest contemporary art documentation project ever undertaken by the East on the East. "Where history is not given," the editors write, "it has to be constructed." This book is that construction.

Details:

East Art Map:
Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe
Edited by IRWIN *
Contributing Editor: Lívia Páldi
Based on the IRWIN * project East Art Map
www.eastartmap.org
*for IRWIN: Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski and Borut Vogelnik

number of pages: 528 pp
date of release: April 2006

Published by Afterall
Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design,
107 – 109 Charing Cross Road,
London WC2H 0DU
www.afterall.org

Series Editors, Afterall Books: Charles Esche and Mark Lewis
Managing Editor, Afterall Books: Caroline Woodley
ISBN Paperback: 1–84638–005–7
ISBN Cloth cover: 1–84638–022–7
Distribution by The MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and London, England
www.mitpress.org

With the support of the Culture 2000 programme of the European Union
Also supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia

> Presentations of the EAM book

 

"East Art Map I"

As a first step (2001-2002), "East Art Map" wanted to present the art of the whole of eastern Europe, to detach individual artists from their national context and to bring them into a unified scheme that could serve as a clear and userfriendly map of eastern European art from 1945 to 2000. IRWIN invited twenty-four well-known art critics, museum directors, and artists to present ten important art projects of the last fifty years from their respective countries. No restrictions were placed on the artworks, the artists, or the happenings those invited might plan. The various selections were compiled into a whole, forming a map that answered such fundamental questions as "who? where? when?" The results were published in September 2002 in the 20th issue of the New Moment magazine. An "East Art Map" was also produced on CD-Rom and presented for the first time in June 2002 at the "Museutopia" exhibition held in the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen, Germany.
ISSN 1580-1322
 
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