Reader

Gender Check: A Reader
Art and Theory in Eastern Europe

This anthology gathers writings on art and gender in Eastern Europe, contributing almost neglected historical and contemporary aspects to present debates, thereby shedding new light on the field as a whole. It is the first representative collection of essays investigating gender issues in social, cultural, and artistic contexts in Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The authors reveal how social and cultural developments and political ideologies affect the construction of gender identities in visual arts produced before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Bojana Pejić has selected a wide variety of texts originally published between 1988 and 2009, dealing with the socialist and post-socialist periods. The reader demonstrates that leading Eastern European feminist and gender scholars, art historians, curators, and artists created a polylogue, a discursive condition that is not a monolithic and unanimous Eastern European dispositive but dialogical and inter-relational. The volume includes a bibliography collecting entries from twenty-four countries, reflecting the reception of gender theories in Eastern European art history and criticism. Gender Check: A Reader – Art and Theory in Eastern Europe offers a key strategic tool for an interrogative and corrective historiography not only of Eastern Europe but of feminist art history in general.

This reader is part of the research and exhibition project Gender Check. The exhibition Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe was shown at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna 2009–10 and Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 2010.

Edited by Bojana Pejić, ERSTE Foundation, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna

Texts by: Anna Alchuk, Branislava Andjelković, Edit András, Zdenka Badovinac, Ágnes Berecz, Lyudmila Bredikhina, Branislav Dimitrijević, Hildtrud Ebert, Ewa Franus, Jana Geržová, Nataša Ilić, Eva Khachatryan, Katrin Kivimaa, Izabela Kowalczyk, Vjollca Krasniqi, Laima Kreivyte, Dejan Kršić, Paweł Leszkowicz, Suzana Milevska, Danica Minić, Olivia Niţis, Aleksis Osmanis, Martina Pachmanová, Bojana Pejić, Piotr Piotrowski, Zora Rusinová, Angeli Sachs, Lydia Sklevicky, Vêra Sokolová, Inga Šteimane, Maria Vassileva, Mirek Vodrážka

The Reader can be purchased at Buchhandlung Walther König:
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König
Cologne, 2010
English, ca. 400 pages, 38 b/w illustrations
25.00 euros