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The second symposium of the ‘Decolonizing the Avant-Garde’ project focuses on post-1945 avant-garde and non-conformist artistic practices in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Japan. The view of the avant-garde that emerged during the Cold War is largely West-centric—attempts to decolonize the post-1945 avant-garde accordingly have tended to focus mainly on its relation to the colonizing and colonialist West. Before and during the Cold War, however, the West was, of course, not the only colonizing and colonialist power. In an attempt to ‘former’ the West (much like the ‘formering' of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall, when many began to refer to the ‘former Eastern Bloc’), this second symposium focuses on avant-garde practitioners across races and ethnicities who worked within Eastern and Central-Eastern Europe—before, behind, and after the fall of the Iron Curtain—as well as within Japan.

Two main issues will be tackled: On the one hand, the symposium wishes to chart how avant-garde artists in these regions critically regarded the West, i.e., the acclaimed center of postwar avant-gardism. What (other) notions or theories of the avant-garde were in circulation here? What decentering practices did avant-garde artists develop? Did the avant-garde in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Japan position itself differently than that in the West? On the other hand, the event seeks to question the mainly Western (art-historical) discourse of decolonization itself. Does that discourse and the power-structures it aims to expose do justice, for example, to the complexities of artists holding ties to Soviet colonies outside the West? Did colonial and colonizing practices play a similar or different role in the avant-garde’s history here? And to what extent should the critical apparatus of decolonization be revised accordingly? To answer these questions, the symposium will also pay attention to Japan and to how its colonial past likewise impacted post-1945 avant-garde practices.