Conference Seeks Papers on Didactic Approaches in Postwar Eastern European Art

A call for papers has been issued for a conference titled 'Instruction and the Didactic Impulse in Postwar Art from Eastern Europe,' scheduled for June 11-12, 2026. The event will be held at the Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in the Arts, part of the National University of the Arts in Iasi, Romania, and is organized in partnership with the Graduate Center for Literary Research at the University of California Santa Barbara. The conference is coordinated by Cristian Nae from George Enescu National University of the Arts in Iasi and Sven Spieker from UC Santa Barbara. The gathering aims to explore instructional methods and didactic tendencies in artistic practices from Eastern Europe after World War II, focusing on how teaching, lecturing, and demonstration have been used as artistic techniques. Key themes include the role of instruction in art production, the aesthetics of socialist realism, conceptual art's engagement with didacticism, and the intersection of art with social critique and pedagogy. Proposals of up to 300 words, along with a 200-word narrative CV, must be submitted by January 15, 2026, to the organizers' email addresses. Notifications of acceptance will be sent in February 2026. The conference seeks to examine the specific characteristics of what it terms an 'instructional turn' in the region, both during state-socialist periods and in contemporary times, addressing under-theorized aspects of post-formalist art production since the late 1960s and 1970s.