Research

Working Meeting, 1-2 July 2008, Vienna

The Gender Check project began with research conducted by 25 art historians, cultural theorists and curators. They examined how gender issues were articulated and how gender politics were reflected in the visual arts of former Eastern Bloc countries during and after the Socialist period. This extensive research, which comprised visual material, selections of theoretical essays and reports written by the researchers, served as a basis for the Gender Check exhibition. A group of researchers, the PATTERNS Advisory Panel and Bojana Pejić discussed the results in two working meetings. One took place at the beginning of July 2008 in Vienna, the second in late November in Ljubljana.

The main issues raised by this international study were ways to review the art of the former Eastern Bloc from a gender perspective, the presence of “latent” and articulate feminist positions during the Socialist period and changes in the gender discourses after 1990. The strategy of networking different regional scenes makes Gender Check unique and invariably results in a discursive process that does not simply yield solutions and the affirmation of national identity concepts, but rather calls such concepts into question and puts them into perspective by comparing them with alternative concepts of identity.

A series of interviews provides more information on the individual research in each country (please click on the list below). The interviews were conducted by Mara Traumane in spring 2009. Traumane herself did the research in Latvia.

Members of the research team and the countries they were working on:

Albania:  Edi Muka
Armenia:  Eva Khachatryan
Belarus:  Almira Ousmanova
Bosnia and Herzegovina:  Dunja Blažević
Bulgaria:  Maria Vassileva
Croatia:  Ivana Bago
Czech Republic:  Martina Pachmanová
Estonia:  Katrin Kivimaa
GDR:  Angelika Richter
Georgia:  Lali Pertenava / Nino Tchogoshvili
Hungary:  Edit András
Kosovo:  Erzen Shkololli
Latvia:  Mara Traumane
Lithuania:  Laima Kreivytė
Macedonia:  Suzana Milevska
Moldova:  Lilia Dragneva
Montenegro:  Bojana Pejić
Poland:  Izabela Kowalczyk
Romania:  Alina Şerban
Russia:  Keti Chukhrov
Serbia:  Branislav Dimitrijević
Slovak Republic:  Zora Rusinová
Slovenia:  Urška Jurman
Ukraine: Olga Bryukhovetska and Hedwig Saxenhuber