Art Beyond Official Doctrines across Central and Eastern Europe

Art in East-Central Europe after 1945 unfolded in the tension between state authority and individual agency. This lesson traces how artists working beyond official frameworks reimagined creative autonomy through performance, mail art, and conceptual experimentation. Linking local dissent to global expressions of avant-garde movements, their work demonstrated how art could persist as criticism and survival; an act of imagination within, against, and beyond political restrictions.

Repression, Resistance, and Spirituality in Latin America

When expression itself became a political act, artists across Latin America turned to experimentation as resistance. From the Anthropophagic and Neo-Concretist revolutions in Brazil to the radical performances of Tucumán Arde and CADA, this lesson traces how artistic practice negotiated repression, reinvented form, and reasserted cultural autonomy. Through gestures of appropriation, abstraction, and community action, art became both testimony and transformation—a means to imagine freedom in the face of control.

Modern Arab Art in a (Post)Colonial Context: Subjectivation, Independence, Emancipation

In the long twentieth century of (post)colonial transformation, art across North Africa and West Asia became a field of negotiation, between tradition and modernity, exile and belonging, the spiritual and the political. From Saloua Raouda Choucair’s geometric abstraction to the visionary experiments of Mohammed Chabâa, Huguette Caland, and Shakir Hassan Al Said, this lesson traces how artists forged plural modernities that resisted both colonial universalism and cultural essentialism. Their work reveals modern art not as imitation, but as a continuous act of translation across histories and languages.

Artistic Practices Across the Soviet and Post-Soviet Space

Art in the Soviet and post-Soviet space unfolds as a history of negotiation between control and autonomy as much as between ideology and imagination. From the poetic subversions of non-conformist painters to the conceptual wit of Sots Art and the radical interventions of Pussy Riot, this lesson traces how artists have continuously redefined the boundaries of freedom. Whether through performance, text, or the politics of the street, their work transforms the struggle against domination into a creative and ethical act of persistence.