The SocialEast Seminar on Networks and Sociability in East European Art provides a forum for the presentation of new research into practices of informal exchange and patterns of alternative communication between experimental artists in the Eastern Bloc.

This conference explores the ways in which unauthorised artistic ideas were able to transgress national and ideological boundaries through networks of friendship and artistic collaboration that flew in the face of an official culture of isolationism, censorship and political control. It focuses on processes of artistic exchange that took shape at a grass-roots level, inventive strategies to surmount bureaucratic obstacles, and the specific meaning of ‘networking’ in the context of communist Eastern Europe.

Speakers include: Ewa Borysiewicz and Maria Matuszkiewicz (Warsaw University), Anthony Gardner (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Beata Hock (Central European University, Budapest), Anda Kļaviņa (Riga), Zofia Kulik (Warsaw), Goran Trbuljak (Zagreb), (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw), Dorota Monkiewicz (Contemporary Museum, Wrocław), Angelika Richter (Berlin), Miško Šuvaković (University of Belgrade), Jasmina Tumbas (Duke University, USA), Sarah Wilson (The Courtauld Institute of Art) and Jutta Vinzent (University of Birmingham).

Speaker biographies and abstracts on: www.socialeast.org

Venue details and booking information: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/calendar.shtml