Beyond the Paradigm of Post-1989 Feminist Art History: Researching All-women Exhibitions in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Croatia/Yugoslavia (1945–1989)

Abstract

There have been some attempts in recent years to construct a global history of all women art initiatives, including those undertaken in Eastern Europe. These have succeeded in – slowly – redrawing a map of all-women art activities, and yet have revealed numerous limitations of revisionist attempts. In this text, we demonstrate how art historiography has developed in Eastern Europe after the political transformation in 1989 and how its anti-communist bias has contributed to the erasure of all-women art activities related to the socialist states’ politics from social memory and feminist art history. In the second part of the text, we develop parallel narratives – on Polish, Czech and Croatian/Yugoslav art scenes, respectively – about how this tendency is to be seen in the research on all-women exhibitions. These observations are a starting point for our histories of all-women exhibitions that include the activities of women artists and women’s organisations so far neglected in postsocialist feminist art historiography.