Overlooked impact

Artistic Exchanges in the Global Cold War: Eastern Bloc-Northern Africa, 1940s-1980s is led by Dr Katarzyna Falęcka, Lecturer in Art History, in Newcastle University’s Fine Art Department, and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The project is co-led with Dr Przemysław Strożek from the Polish Academy of Sciences.

It will examine the four decades where fine art students from Northern Africa arrived in the former Eastern Bloc – countries such as Poland and Hungary - as part of university exchanges and to attend World Youth and Student Festivals designed to cement anti-western, anti-colonial, and socialist alliances. Northern African artists frequently exhibited in the Eastern Bloc, while their European counterparts participated in art festivals and took up teaching roles in fine art departments in countries including Morocco and Tunisia. 

The impact these exchanges had on modern art has been overlooked, explains Dr Falęcka.  “We tend to think of Paris and London as cosmopolitan cities," she said. "But Warsaw, Prague and Casablanca were equally attractive to some of the leading artists at the time. The celebrated Moroccan painter Ahmed Cherkaoui declared that his stay in Warsaw in the 1960s taught him everything there was to know about modern art. This caught our attention.” 

Complex network

The £250k project will explore how these transregional encounters ensured the transfer of ideas and inspired debates on what it meant to be modern in the aftermath of the Second World War and during decolonisation struggles.

Through a focus on artists and exhibitions, Artistic Exchanges in the Global Cold War aims to understand the complex network of artists, organisations, labour unions, funding bodies and curators who contributed to this unique cultural landscape.

 “We are interested in the situated aspects of Cold War cultural politics,” added Dr Falecka. “What was the leading Sudanese artist Ibrahim el Salahi’s experience during the 1955 Warsaw World Festival of Youth and Students, where he was photographed handing out autographs to a large crowd? How did extended stays in East Germany shape the artistic practices of Algerian artists M’hamed Issiakhem and Mustapha Adane? We want to uncover these untold stories to better understand the historical relations between Africa and Europe”.

The researchers will prioritise gathering testimonies of artists and their descendants, as well as curators to recover these histories and publish them as podcasts in cooperation with the  Centre d'Études Maghrébines (CEMAT) in Tunis.