Artistic Exchanges in the Global Cold War: Eastern Bloc-Northern Africa, 1940s-1980s

The project will explore how transregional artistic exchanges between countries of the former Eastern Bloc and Northern Africa shaped modern art during the Global Cold War, 1940s-1980s. Transregional encounters of artists ensured the transfer of ideas and inspired debates on what it meant to be modern in the aftermath of the Second World War and during decolonisation struggles. During the Global Cold War, fine art students from Northern Africa arrived in the Eastern Bloc as part of university exchanges and to attend International Youth and Student Festivals designed to cement anti-western, anti-colonial, and socialist alliances. Northern African artists exhibited in the Eastern Bloc, while their European counterparts participated in art festivals and took up teaching roles in fine art departments across Northern Africa. Through archival research, oral history and postcolonial art historical methods, this project aims to understand how the socialist ideas of the Eastern Bloc and the anti-colonial discourses in Northern Africa shaped the practices of modern artists working across these geographies. Eastern Bloc-Northern Africa responds to rising xenophobic nationalism in many countries of the former Eastern Bloc and a tendency to marginalise transregional exchanges in histories of cultural decolonisation across Northern Africa. It proposes to counteract these tendencies by centring cross-cultural mobilities and transfers that destabilise ideas of national homogeneity and cultural authenticity. Focusing on transfers, contact zones and reciprocal exchanges, the project responds to the 'mobilities turn' in the humanities and social sciences, building on recent developments in global art history (DaCosta Kaufmann 2015; Flood 2009, 2011; Fremont 2022). Attending to questions of cultural hybridity, translation and mistranslation, the project is committed to unravelling the cosmopolitan and hybrid nature of modern art in two regions whose cultural production, contrary to that of the 'West' (Mercer 1994, 2005, 2008; Sonn 2022), is rarely analysed through a transregional lens. How did the Polish artist Anna Draus-Hafid, who opened a weaving studio at the fine art academy in Casablanca in 1972, help shape Moroccan discussions about craft and postcolonial identity? How did the experimental pedagogies of the art school in Prague condition the work of Tunisian artist and later museum director Zoubeir Turki? What led Moroccan painter Ahmed Cherkaoui to declare that his internship at the art academy in Warsaw taught him everything there was to know about modern art? The project's focus on multiple communities, audiences and exposure to ideas and practices is matched by the international dissemination of research through a confirmed partnership and exhibition with the Centre d'Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT), an edited volume (with translations of selected chapters into English), articles in peer-reviewed journals, a workshop in Newcastle and a series of nine podcasts that can be accessed by people worldwide. The Core Team will also make selected material pertaining to the study and teaching of modern art from both regions available on a digital platform supported by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), of which CEMAT is a member. A vast majority of relevant archives are not well-known and do not have digital databases, slowing down art historical research. This project is as much about an inquiry into transregional histories of art as it is about sharing research methods and resources that can facilitate future research and curatorial work in this field.