Art History & Fine Arts Department Hosts International Symposium: Decolonizing the Avant-garde

Over two days, AUP professors, speakers from across Europe and the United States, students and guests gathered in person and online to discuss and debate during the symposium “Decolonizing the Post-war Avant-garde in the West” held at AUP on June 12-13, 2024. The symposium is part one of a larger, three-year collaborative research initiative that seeks to explore the post-1945 history and idea that the avant-garde could be decolonized. Both a key concept and a significant artistic formation in modern art, the avant-garde has often been characterized as a typically Western phenomenon, sometimes synonymous with a white, imperialist, if not outright racist “primitivizing” artistic undertaking, which has contributed in part to the expression falling into desuetude.

In recent years, however, if mention was still made of the avant-garde in critical debates on contemporary art, it was either in derogatory terms or to signal that the moment of the post-avant-garde had arrived. AUP Professor of Art History and Fine Arts Iveta Slavkova and fellow organizers Sascha Bru (University of Leuven), Fabrice Flahutez (Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne), and Isabel Wünsche (Constructor University, Bremen) have recognized the need to revise this dominant discourse. Indeed, while it is undoubtedly true that certain representatives of the so-called historic and neo-avant-garde in the West held problematic views and engaged in equally problematic practices, much more seems to have been going on right from the start of the early 20th century. In recent decades, research has amply shown that the avant-garde across the arts had already asserted itself before the Second World War in Latin America, Northern Africa, and Asia – an aspect this project also takes into account.

Starting with the question: “How can we decolonize the post-1945 avant-garde within the West?,” the first symposium in Paris, one of the historical centers of the avant-garde, explored the impact of colonization and colonialism within Europe’s, Northern America’s and Australia’s geographical borders on post- 1945 practices of avant-garde artists across races and ethnicities. Each 30-minute paper was followed by a 15-minute discussion, and the event closed with a plenary debate, which raised even more questions. Those will continue to be discussed at future symposia in Dresden in 2025 and Berlin in 2026, organized by Sascha Bru and Isabel Wünsche in partnership with local institutions.

As Professor Slavkova highlights, the avant-garde is not a homogenous phenomenon, and no matter if before or after 1945, it was the most often inclusive, trans-national and open to other cultures. The symposium provided a great starting point to explore the processes of decolonization in recent history, pointing at what was successful and what remains problematic. The speakers pursued different approaches: some, convinced by the decolonizing potential of the avant-garde, drew attention to lesser studied artists and works, practices of appropriation and resistance; others expressed reservations of the term, too closely related to a heroic, white, male vision of the act of creation and the artworld. The discussions were fruitful and profound. Far from exhaustive, the symposium offered an exploratory forum for lively debate and academic exchange “I clearly see how we can incorporate these topics into our teaching as part of our effort to “decolonize” the art history curriculum at AUP”, Professor Slavkova concluded.

For more information about future symposia within this project, keep an eye on the website.