Modernism's Future Pasts: Abstraction and Identity in 'East-Central Europe', 1910-1930s

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen has received a Getty Connecting Art Histories  grant to support the Modernism's Future Pasts research initiative led by Professor Megan Luke and Dr Katia Denysova.

Modernism's Future Pasts is a travelling research seminar that considers the emergence of abstraction from an East-Central European perspective, challenging the overtly Westernized and Sovietized narratives of modern art in the region. A network of early and mid-career researchers and curators from the countries of the former Eastern bloc within Europe and the Soviet Union (particularly Ukraine) will visit collections at institutions across Poland (2025), the Czech Republic (2026) and Ukraine (or Estonia depending on the geopolitical situation) and partner with local repositories to digitize and disseminate archival documents and artworks. In tandem with this initiative, the organizers plan to host a capstone winter school at the Universität Tübingen (2027), where participants will join with other scholars working on the history of abstraction to discuss methodology, terminology, and intellectual frameworks. Scholarship by network participants will be translated and shared on a peer-reviewed, open-source publication for international academic audiences.

The project strives to generate an increased international appreciation of the heterogeneity of the region's modernist artistic practices and institutional structures while fostering a greater mutual understanding of academic cultures within the region and beyond. The network will work to bridge the existing divide between the two sub-regions that have structured the study of abstract art and design in this cultural space: the former republics of the USSR and its satellite states.

Core Team

Prof. Dr. Megan Luke, co-director
Dr Katia Denysova, co-director
 
Andrij Bojarov, senior advisor 
Andrij Bojarov is a visual artist, independent curator and researcher. He trained as an architect and has been active as an artist since the late 1980s/early 1990s, initially having worked in large-format painting. At that time, he pioneered video art in the post-soviet states and turned to conceptual photography, taking part in various group and individual exhibitions in Tallinn, Lviv, Warsaw, Łódź, Poznań, Kyiv, Berlin, Amsterdam, and many other locations. Starting in the 2000s, he focused on exploring the largely neglected local histories of avant-garde art in the Central European context, expanding and blending his artistic and curatorial work with research practices.
 
Daniel Muzyczuk, senior advisor
Daniel Muzyczuk is the interim director of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. He has curated, among others, the following exhibitions: Sounding the Body Electric: Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1957–1984 (with David Crowley), Notes from the Underground: Art and Alternative Music in Eastern Europe 1968–1994 (with David Crowley), The Museum of Rhythm (with Natasha Ginwala), Through The Soundproof Curtain: The Polish Radio Experimental Studio (with Michał Mendyk), Work, work, work (work). Céline Condorelli and Wendelien van Oldenborgh (with Joanna Sokołowska). He was also the co-curator of the Polish Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (with Agnieszka Pindera). His upcoming book is titled Twilight of the Magicians (2025, Spector Books)
 
Prof. Matthew Rampley, senior advisor 
Matthew Rampley is professor of art history at Masaryk University in Brno. His teaching and research focus on Central European art and architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries, on art historiography, aesthetics, and modern and contemporary art. He is the author of numerous publications, including Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity (2000), In Remembrance of Things Past: Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin (2000), The Vienna School of Art History (2013), The Seductions of Darwin (2017), and Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire (2020) and The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary (2021). He was also editor of Art History and Visual Studies in Europe (2012) and Heritage, Ideology and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe (2012). Among his major research projects were Continuity / Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe, 1918-1939 (ERC Advanced Grant, 2018–2023), Promoting National and Imperial Identities: Museums in Austria-Hungary 1864-1918 (Leverhulme Trust, 2014-2017), and Czechs and the Colonial World: Design and Visual Culture since 1848 (Czech Grant Agency, 2025-2029). He was also holder of a Masaryk Award in the Sciences and the Humanities (2019–24).
 
Prof. Michael White, senior advisor
Michael White is a professor of art history at the University of York. His research and teaching concern histories and legacies of the European avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, with a particular focus on abstract art, intermedial and transnational art practices, art theories and historiographies of modernism. His most significant publications include the books De Stijl and Dutch Modernism (2003) and Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War (2013) and the edition Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada (2014). He was consultant curator of the Tate Modern exhibition Theo van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World (2010) and the co-curator of Mondrian and his Studios at Tate Liverpool (2014). He is currently working on two projects, a revisionist account of Dada in New York and an edition concerning avant-gardism and the 'Middle East'.

 
Network Participants

Camilla Balbi is a post-doctoral researcher at the Photography Research Centre, Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, in Prague. She obtained a PhD in Visual and Media Studies at IULM University in Milan (2023); and was a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Department of German Studies in 2020/21. Camilla is interested in the intersections between media practices and artistic languages, and her main research interests include early 20th-century German-Jewish art theory and theory of photography; studies of reception and imagery related to the reproduced image. Her first monograph Erwin Panofsky e la modernità: pittura fotografia film was published in 2025 by Mimesis Milano. Alongside these interests, she writes and works on political art and eccentric visual cultures, working on the specificities of the Jewish gaze and the female and queer gaze.
 
Alexandru Bar is a cultural historian and Research Associate in the Department of History of Art at the University of York. He was recently awarded the Ștefan Odobleja Fellowship at the New Europe College, Bucharest, for the 2025–26 academic year. His research bridges art history, Jewish studies, and cultural history, with a particular focus on the avant-garde and modernist movements of the 20th century. He completed his MA at Tel Aviv University and his PhD at the University of Leeds, where his dissertation examined the complex relationship between Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, exploring how their layered identities shaped their artistic production and political positioning. Alexandru’s current research investigates Janco’s transcultural legacy – from his contributions to European modernism and his responses to the Holocaust, to his postwar engagement with vernacular architecture and heritage preservation in Israel. His recent publications include ‘Dada Lingua Franca: The Linguistic Fate of Tristan Tzara and Raoul Hausmann’ (with Michael White) in Cannibalizing the Canon: Dada Techniques in East-Central Europe (Brill, 2024) and ‘Defying Assimilation: Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco’s Indomitable Identity’ in Passing: Anatomies and Physiologies of Identity Transformations (Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2024).
 
Olena Chervonik holds a PhD in art history from the University of Oxford; MA in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; BA in linguistics from the Kyiv National Linguistics University. Currently, Olena cooperates with the Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography (MOKSOP) as a curator, academic editor and translator of the series on the history and theory of photography. Previously, she worked as a curator of contemporary art in several institutions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art (USA), Izolyatsia. Platform for Cultural Initiatives (Donetsk, Ukraine), Videonale. Festival of Video Art in Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany) and Spencer Museum of Art in Kansas (USA).
 
Masha Chlenova holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University. She is part-time Assistant Professor of Art History at Eugene Lang College at The New School and an independent curator based in New York City. She held curatorial positions at the Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, organized independent exhibitions, served as a guest curator at Munchmuseet in Oslo and as a curatorial consultant for The Avant-Garde Museum at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Her primary focus is on the historical avant-gardes; early abstraction across the media; museology and history of exhibitions. She is working on a book on early Soviet museology and its European reception. Her second current research and exhibition project examines the historical avant-gardes of the 1910s–30s through the prism of cosmopolitanism, internationalism and nomadism, underscoring their transnational drive in combination with the need to establish cultural sovereignty of several newly independent nations.   
 
Kamila Kociałkowska is an Assistant Professor of History of Art at the University of Warwick. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2020 and has held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Davis Center and Harvard University, amongst others. Her research focuses on Soviet modernism, with a particular interest in the cultures and practices of censorship and their impact on artistic production. Her work has been published in Modernism/modernity, Oxford Art Journal, and the forthcoming Manchester University Press edited volume, Soviet Materialities.
 
Lucia Kvočáková has recently completed a postdoctoral research position (2023–24) in the Department of 19th–21st Century Art at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, where she is currently involved in the project Art Exhibitions in the Czech Lands 1820–1950, focusing on the cultural and political dimensions of exhibition practices in Central Europe. She holds a PhD in art history from Charles University in Prague (2020); her dissertation on the construction of Slovak modernist identity within the ideological framework of Czechoslovakism was published as the monograph Cesta ke slovenskému mýtu. Konstrukce identity slovenské moderny v kontextu ideje čechoslovakismu (2020). Her research focuses on the entanglements of visual culture, nationalism, and institutional practices within the identity shaping discourses in Central Europe – particularly in the Slovak and Czech contexts during the interwar period.
 
Radu Remus Macovei is a Registered Architect (New York), researcher and educator, currently a Lecturer and Doctoral Fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH - Zürich. His ongoing doctorate reinterprets the project of modernity through tradition. His research focuses on the physical relocation of wooden churches from the countryside to cities in the early 20th-century in East-Central Europe, reconstructing the tensions between national agendas and lived experiences. This topic builds on design research he developed through University of Wisconsin’s Architecture Fellowship (2022–23), Harvard University’s Appleton Fellowship (2020) and Robert A.M. Stern’s Travelling Fellowship (2019).

Gabrielė Radzevičiūtė is an art historian and curator based in Vilnius, Lithuania. She is a PhD candidate in art history at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, working on the project titled ‘Visualization of Everyday Life in Lithuanian Interwar Art’. In her thesis, she rethinks artistic legacies related to the (non)representation of everyday life in the First Lithuanian Republic (1918–40). Her main research interests are the (de)sovietization of modern art histories and the intersection of art, society and politics in the 20th century. Alongside her research, she has curated numerous local and international exhibitions, including Margins and Boundaries. Social Criticism in Interwar Lithuania (National Gallery of Art, 2022); The Meeting that Never Was (MO Museum, 2022); and the permanent display of Lithuanian art of the first half of the 20th century (National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, 2025). She has worked as a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius since 2022.

Jane Schmidt-Boddy is an art historian and curator whose research explores concepts of form and feeling in fin-de-siècle European art, as well as intersections of visual culture, philosophy, and psycho-aesthetics more broadly. After earning her doctorate in art history from the University of Vienna, she worked as an assistant curator at the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Currently, she is a curator of prints and drawings at the Saarlandmuseum – Moderne Galerie in Saarbrücken, where she is preparing an exhibition on negative emotions in modern graphic art, titled Die dunkle Seite. Verborgene Gefühle in der Grafik der Moderne, which is scheduled for autumn/winter 2025–26.
 
Julia Secklehner is an art historian specializing in cultural production in rural areas, along with issues of gender and minority representation in Central European modernism. Her current research interests focus on networks of women photographers and activist youth groups in 1930s Czechoslovakia and Hungary, as well as the role of popular craft practices, such as knitting, in modern cultural production. She is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow (2024–25) at Constructor University (Bremen) and otherwise based at Masaryk University (Brno), where she collaborates on the project ‘Beyond the Village. Folk Cultures as Agents of Modernity, 1918–1945’, funded by the Czech Science Foundation. Julia has published extensively on rural and regional modernism in Central Europe, including the monograph Rethinking Modern Austrian Art Beyond the Metropolis (Routledge), which received a Masaryk University Scientist Award in 2025. She serves as an editorial board member of Art East Central and the Journal of Austrian-American History.

Veronika Soukupová is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Theory of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague. Her research focuses on early- and mid-20th-century textile art and design in East-Central Europe. In her doctoral project, she examines the work of textile artist, theorist, and member of the Czechoslovak avant-garde Jaroslava Vondráčková (1894–1986), including her personal and professional networks, and her engagement with diverse cultural and social-political contexts and discourses. Exploring this case study, she traces intersections of artistic, institutional, theoretical, and ideological practices, and reconsiders established narratives in the history of art and design.

Merse Pál Szeredi is an art historian, curator and director of the Kassák Museum, Budapest (a member institution of the Hungarian National Museum Public Collection Centre – Petőfi Literary Museum). He submitted his PhD dissertation in 2025 on the international networks of Lajos Kassák’s avant-garde magazine Ma (Today), published in Vienna in 1920–25. His research focuses on interwar Hungarian modernist and avant-garde literature and visual arts, with an emphasis on international networks. His papers are published in Hungarian and international periodicals, edited volumes and exhibition catalogues. He curated and co-curated several exhibitions at the Kassák Museum, the Petőfi Literary Museum, and the Virág Judit Gallery. Currently, he is working on a digital critical edition of Kassák and Jolán Simon’s correspondence between 1908 and 1928 at the Kassák Museum (with Sára Bagdi and Gábor Dobó). Most recently, he co-edited the volume Cannibalizing the Canon: Dada Techniques in East-Central Europe (with Oliver A. I. Botar, Irina Denischenko and Gábor Dobó, Brill, 2024).