Beyond the Paradigm of Post-1989 Feminist Art History. Researching All-women Exhibitions in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Croatia/Yugoslavia (1945-1989)
Abstract
There have been some attempts in recent years to construct a global history of all-women art initiatives, including those undertaken in Eastern Europe. They have succeeded in - slowly - redrawing a map of all-women art activities, and yet, have revealed numerous limitations of revisionist attempts.
In this text, we demonstrate how the specificity of (art) historiography developed in Eastern Europe after the political transformation in 1989, particularly its anti-communist bias, contributed to the erasure of all-women art activities related to socialist states' politics from social memory and feminist art history. In the second part of the text, we develop parallel narratives - on Polish, Czech and Croatian/Yugoslav art scenes, respectively - about how this tendency manifests itself in the research on all-women exhibitions.
These observations are a starting point for our histories of all-women exhibitions that include activities of women artists and women organisations so far neglected in post-socialist feminist art historiography.