Third Text

15 April 2025

Hamida Sivac

‘Iron Curtains or Artistic Gates? Communism and Cultural Diplomacy in the Global South (1945–1991 and Beyond)’, a two-day workshop at the Belvedere, Vienna, Austria, 19–20 September 2024 ^[1]

There are at least two reasons why the Belvedere Museum in Vienna makes a noteworthy venue for a workshop on the histories of the Cold War. The first derives from a well-remembered collective past: the signing of Austria’s State Treaty in May 1955 in the Marble Hall in the Upper Belvedere, when the formerly occupied Austrian territory re-established democratic sovereignty. ^[2]  Among the signatories were not only democratic but communist states; it was ratified by the Soviet Union and acceded to by Czechoslovakia, Poland, Mexico and Yugoslavia. By virtue of this diversity, the cultural institution of the Belvedere was once the site of a complex geopolitical convergence between various ideological blocs, hosting a key political decision that transcended dichotomous divides and thus posing an early threat to the idea of a bipolar Cold War. Over half a century later, the workshop ‘Iron Curtains or Artistic Gates?’ continued to challenge traditional histories of superpower binaries at the same venue, but this time from the perspective of visual culture.

The second reason lies in another collective past and present that cannot be found in historical records – which spans Vienna’s streets and my own memories: upon my arrival in Vienna from the ex-Yugoslavian state of Bosnia-Hercegovina, I was taught by other ‘Yugo’s’ that ‘the territory of the Balkans in fact begins at Rennweg’ – the street bordering the Belvedere at its northeastern end. This light-hearted expression conjures Vienna’s Cold War past saturated with migrant workers (Gastarbeiter*innen) from southeastern Europe and northwestern Asia and confirms the presence of their descendants, concentrated in the urban quarter east of the Belvedere. To them, this particular area still represents a cultural gate to the ‘East’, which the workshop pushed wide open.

This well-attended international symposium examined histories of cultural contact between the shifting territories of the communist ‘East’ and the ‘Global South’ in the age of decolonisation and the Cold War. ^[3]  It brought together nineteen scholars, artists and curators from a wide range of disciplines and geographies, although most of the workshop’s transdisciplinary perspectives were rooted in Central-East European Art Studies, a field that is increasingly delving into cross-cultural dialogues with the Global South, and thus – albeit still tentatively – approximating Decolonial Studies. ^[4]  Over two days, the programme focused on art relations through the lens of cultural diplomacy, which was negotiated both in its narrow definition as a ‘strategic exercise of policy’, ^[5] and in its broader meaning as the totality of formal and informal cross-cultural interactions.

In their introduction, organisers Anna-Marie Kroupová and Noémie Etienne specified that the term ‘Iron Curtains’ was chosen intentionally as a discussion point worth examining in order to highlight the still prevalent narrative of a divided Europe. Despite many scholarly attempts to reframe this somewhat misleading notion as more of a ‘Nylon Curtain’ or ‘semipermeable membrane’, ^[6] the term ‘Iron Curtain’ undoubtedly remains dominant in any thinking and talking about the Cold War. Numerous points of cultural contact between ‘Eastern Bloc’, ‘West’, Western-aligned, Non-Aligned and postcolonial ‘Global South’ identified in the workshop allowed us to reimagine transnational histories as punctuated with gates guarded by – at times intimidating – Cold War policy, bureaucracy and security. Often difficult to cross, these gates still offered a continued, yet highly selective passage of people, goods and ideas, through which another kind of globalisation was advanced counter to capitalist principles, ^[7] spurred by anti-imperialist attitudes and selective solidarity. The histories and notions of solidarity could be singled out as the controversial leitmotif of the workshop.

Minutes before the start of the workshop in the prestigious interior of the wedding octagon, Upper Belvedere, Vienna,
photo by Franziska Wasserberg

Cold War, Hot Trajectories

In line with the venue, the topic of the first panel was the museum as a space of encounter in the Cold War. Jakub Gawkowski elaborated how the micro-histories of a museum can be useful in understanding the role of art institutions in the soft power enterprises of communist states. Through meticulous archival work – ‘following the mundane rather than the spectacular’ – Gawkowski located points of contact between the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland, and South American artists in the 1960s. Even though these relationships emerged through small-scale local exchanges, they played a substantial role in the growing proximity between the two socialist cultures. Initiating an exchange of contemporary arts was somewhat akin to walking on a tightrope for local actors who tried to stay within the confines of state policy and simultaneously sought to actively participate in international modernity.

Artists had to perform a similar balancing act when seeking international economic opportunities. Following another micro-historical path, Marcin Lewicki drew attention to the individual strategies of Polish artists who sought global recognition, observing a reorientation away from art markets in the West to commercial co-operations in the Global South after their participation in the São Paulo Biennial of 1961. This shift challenges the idea that only the West offered profitable opportunities for artists during the Cold War.

Conversely, socialist states often actively sought to exhibit arts from postcolonial Souths. Rado Ištok analysed the travelling exhibition ‘Modern African Art’ (1972), curated by Ulli Beier, and demonstrated how personal agency played a crucial role in shaping international interactions. Beier’s exhibitions subverted the idea of African arts in the European eye: expecting traditional and rural handcrafts, viewers were confronted with abstract formations by artists from urban areas, mainly Nigeria. Surprisingly, the show first took place in a moment of stark censorship in Prague in 1972, four years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The staging of the exhibition during this period of caesura complicates the idea of historical ruptures and illustrates how they often cannot be understood as clear cuts across cultural and social landscapes, but sometimes sink in slowly.

On topic, Anna-Marie Kroupová reminded us that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia did not mean that international collaborations came to a complete halt. In focusing on scholastic exchange from 1968 to 1989, Kroupová identified a comparatively large number of art students from the Global South who enrolled into the Fine Arts Academy in Prague, and emphasised how, thanks to various bilateral agreements, educational exchange was a common way of crossing the iron gates. Furthermore, Kroupová brought to light trans-systemic artistic tendencies and intersecting visual cultures that dissolve the West-East divide through an analysis of the art and exhibition work of a student from Vietnam.

Concurrently, communist Czechoslovakia was engaged in active efforts to establish transatlantic relations with South America. Maroš Timko uncovered some covert Czechoslovakian efforts to intervene in Colombia’s cultural landscape and thereby illustrated a mixed context in which US influence and anti-communist campaigns clashed with sympathies for communism. In investigating such ambiguous state-level cultural initiatives as part of larger geopolitical enterprises, Timko demonstrated how transatlantic relations went well beyond the Cold War binary of ally or rival.

Similarly complicated was the relationship between the USA and Brazil. Marcelo Mari unrolled the postwar histories of US cultural interventions that promoted Pan-American unity with the aim of securing commercial and geopolitical interests in Latin America. As part of this strategy, art museums were implemented as tools of soft power. Funded by US industry moguls involved in exploiting Brazil’s natural resources, modern art museums were built and filled with Western abstract art, in part to counter the locally popular Socialist Realism. Mari evoked the epistemological violence of US cultural imperialism by calling these museums ‘fortresses of freedom’.

In this period of Latin American tensions with US imperialist enterprises, many socialist countries sought alliances with like-minded governments, with the goal of offsetting global power imbalances. Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez proposed that the role of art in these endeavours was more complex than might be assumed. By tracing the European destinations of Mexico’s state-funded propaganda exhibition platform Frente Nacional des Artes Plásticas (FNAP), Martínez Rodríguez uncovered that the conflicting parties of both socialist art and art that is critical of socialist politics was exhibited. These artworks avoided state censorship by promoting solidarity in a socialist vision. FNAP’s main concern seems to have been the spread of solidarity to create a basis for future political and financial co-operations, as cultural projects were frequently utilised as trailblazers for economic and political objectives.

The circulation of artworks as an act of solidarity can also manifest itself in the form of donations. Jovanka Popova illustrated how, following a disastrous earthquake in 1963, the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje in North Macedonia is based entirely on international donations from countries with various political alignments across the globe. While solidarity donations might be thought of as a necessity, the experience of this particular museum reveals how a legacy built on solidarity can become the institution’s identity, and, moreover, its strategy for survival. The public desire to preserve this ‘symbol of solidarity’ ^[8] has already resisted reactionary seizures in times of political instability.

Solidarity in the Cold War is often associated with large social movements and political campaigns. However, these provide only a partial view of actual camaraderie between individuals, as Christopher Williams-Wynn suggested by focusing on micro-forms of solidarity between the artists Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt in the GDR and Horacio Zabala in Argentina. Even though they probably never met, traces of support between these artists living in different oppressive regimes can be found in what ordinarily remains invisible: in dedications on versos, unpublished notes and the transnational relations established through Mail Art networks when travel was not viable, thus creating circuits and long-distance forms of solidarity.

Despite much of the recent scholarship on Cold War art exchanges emphasising solidarity, Maria Silina and Yi Gu went against the grain to uncover past interactions between the Soviet Union and China through the notion of infrastructures instead. Facing archival blanks and access restrictions, the researchers tried to trace the ‘invisible ties’ of former relations by consulting art objects and institutions as repositories of the past, as once vivid infrastructures. Such is the Oriental Museum in Moscow, which testifies to formerly rich Sino-Soviet art exchanges, including donations, painting courses and stylistic appropriations. After the Sino-Soviet split in the 1980s, this mutual influence was denied. In place of preserving a legacy of collaboration, this study demonstrated how sometimes systemic silence, deliberate amnesia and self-censorship are more likely to shape the construction of national identities.

Similarly, Olja Triaška Stefanović explored the deliberate practices of collective amnesia in Yugoslavia’s past. Departing from the simple question of why her family owns so many books by African authors, the artist stumbled across President Josip Broz Tito’s animal diplomacy and turned to unorthodox sources, such as postage stamps depicting the ship that transferred animals, safari-like landscapes on the Brijuni islands in Croatia, the elephant ‘Lanka’ from Sri Lanka, and ‘Koki’ the talking cockatoo who repeatedly invokes the past by calling out ‘Tito, Tito, Tito’. Opening up research practices to wildlife, broadcasting, classified papers, travelogues, the family’s house and personal memory, Stefanović exhausted the vast potentials of the extended archive. By highlighting the imperialist masculinity of diplomatic practices such as hunting with world leaders, or the exchange of hunting portraits and trophies, Stefanović’s presentation also drew attention to the gender and racial dimensions of both diplomatic practices and solidarity.

Christine Varga-Harris’s investigation of the representations of African women in the Soviet Union was the only presentation at the workshop to weave questions of race and gender into its central argument. In the transitional context of a decolonising Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, one noteworthy magazine run entirely by Soviet women (Soviet Woman) advanced an outreach to African women as subjects of change. Instead of primarily mobilising the prevailing ethnographic tropes of exoticised femininity, closeness to nature, poverty, backwardness and infantilisation, the magazine featured a variety of representations. Even though new stereotypes came to displace the old ones – such as ‘mother of men’ – the magazine gave African women a space through individual portraits and a voice through interviews.

Solidarity as propagated by communist states in relation to Africa was aided by the fact that no country of the Eastern Bloc – despite various colonial fantasies ^[9] – ever held colonies on the continent. Against the background of this self-positioning as anti-colonial and anti-imperial, many unexpected bilateral agreements and economic partnerships were forged in a world where new alliances were still to be developed. An initial approach was often advanced via cultural initiatives emphasising socialist solidarity in opposition to exploitative capitalism. Investigating the propagandistic functions of such exchanges, Domnica Gorovei analysed bilateral relations between Romania and Francophone Western African countries in the 1970s. Gorovei documented a great number of cultural co-operations in sports, education, science and art, to discover that the nature of these collaborations was clearly defined by European cultural agendas. Gorovei’s talk thus encouraged postcolonial questions of cultural imperialism, racism and of geopolitical dependencies on the former coloniser.

Shedding more light on the diverse attitudes toward solidarity, the keynote lecture from Beáta Hock explicated how different leftist groups have entertained conflictual relationships toward state endorsed solidarity. Socialist artists, Western political radicals and activists from the Global South called for real engagement in place of the fictious solidarity propagated by the socialist state, and instead, sought inspiration for solidarity in decolonial struggles, antiwar movements and in the arts of the Global South. A case in point is Algeria. During its war of independence, Algeria became both a symbol for revolutionary struggle for the communist East and an ideological issue for the West, traditionally aligned with the coloniser, France.

Gaëlle Prodhon discussed how a considerable share of solidarity with Algeria materialised through the dissemination of images. In mapping the circulation of photographs between Algeria and its ‘comrade’ countries in Eastern Europe, Prodhon painted a complex picture of the different imaginaries, actors and institutions involved in the representations and negotiations of Algerian postcolonial identities. The presentation brought to mind that identity formation must not be a top-down prescription of prefabricated images but can evolve through a myriad of notions and representations, produced and circulated by many different actors. In this decolonial process, photography – once a colonial assistant in depicting the Other – was turned into an instrument of empowerment and self-determination in the struggle for a new Self.

In the Sub-Saharan context, however, photographic skill was imported as a medium of soft power, as Sasha Artamonova suggested in a discussion about a boarding school for press photography in East Berlin, Schule der Solidarität (School of Solidarity). What was remarkable about the school was its exclusive focus on journalists coming from the newly independent countries of West Africa, who were taught Soviet press photography by GDR photographers. Through a micro-historical analysis of the school’s surprisingly experimental agenda, Artamonova conveyed a larger picture of crisis in Soviet photography and its shift toward new aesthetics.

Communist interventions into the representational fabric of emerging postcolonial identities and the production of anticolonial aesthetics were also investigated by Louise Thurin, who scrutinised peculiar constellations of mosaics in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Tropical Socialist Realism, monumental architecture and the figure of ‘Black Prometheus’ breaking his chains intersect. The path of this figure with Marxist roots stretches widely from Guinea over Burkina Faso, Ghana and Nigeria to Russia. In an impressive journey, Thurin uncovered ‘Black Prometheus’ to be of Soviet origin and explicated the communist efforts of going beyond the notions of ‘tribal’ and ‘ethnic’ in crafting a uniform image for Africa, however difficult that is on such a diverse continent. Instead of perceiving Black Prometheus as invasive, this allegory of rebellion, light and knowledge was readily appropriated by many African nations in search of a common iconography of independence.

The second day of the workshop began with the panel ‘Camaraderie’, with chair Christiane Erharter and speaker Jovanka Popova, photo by Franziska Wasserberg

Iron Souths?

The majority of the workshop contributions examined the ways in which the communist and socialist East sought to shape the Global South, rather than exploring reciprocal influences. This approach reflects the situatedness of the contributors as primarily based in Central and Eastern Europe. Although multidirectional readings were certainly attempted, participants found it challenging to advance their material research in this direction due to archival constraints and limitations. In the concluding remarks, Noémie Etienne illustrated the persistent issues with the archive by noting that it ‘is beautiful, strange, has a lot to say, but is repeating itself’ like Koki the parrot. And yet, researchers found ways to productively deploy these resistances of the archive by concentrating on its silences as epistemological sites, revealing collective amnesia, deliberate self-censorship and state control over the making and keeping of histories through archives, which are arsenals of history as much as they are ‘sites of fiction’. ^[10]  I would have been interested in hearing more about the particular silences surrounding the communist conceptions of equality and solidarity in relation to ethnicity, gender and class in decolonial contexts. Regarding methodology, the workshop’s comparative approach forged thought-provoking perspectives on Cold War relations, harnessing micro-historical close readings in combination with macro-historical overviews in undoing some of the persistent biases and hierarchies still governing the histories of the ‘Global South’ and the ‘East’. By emphasising crucial historical discontinuities other than 1989, the workshop papers diversified the Cold War timeline and reinforced the importance of a simultaneity of multiple temporalities in thinking geopolitics and cultural relations. To this end, underrepresented paradigm shifts with vast global implications but usually discussed only in their respective contexts – such as 1956 in Hungary, 1960 in Nigeria, 1962 in Algeria and 1968 in Czechoslovakia, to name but a few – were highlighted during the workshop to reflect convergences and correlations. However, the scholarly backgrounds were not as diverse as the topics. Especially in view of the institutional ties, positions from the Global South remained marginal – and despite the workshop organisers’ active efforts to counteract it, European scholarship seems to remain caught in the condition of restricted access through its iron gates.

^[1]    For the full programme, see the Workshop programme and announcement on the Heritage Studies Vienna website

^[2]    This treaty was signed by representatives from the UK, France, the United States, the Soviet Union and the Austrian foreign minister Leopold Figl, and later acceded to by Czechoslovakia, Poland, Mexico and Yugoslavia.

^[3]    I am using the terms ‘East’, ‘Global South’ and ‘West’ with all the necessary precaution and reflexivity, understanding them as complex denominators that do not invoke monolithic concepts or territories, but rather geopolitically, historically and ideologically shifting positions and geographies.

^[4]    See, for example, Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Piotr Piotrowski, eds, Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe, Central European University Press, Budapest and New York, 2016; and the conferences ‘Socialist Internationalism and the Global Contemporary’, GWZO, Leipzig, 2017; ‘The Global GDR: A Transcultural History of Art (1949–1990)’ as well as the exhibition ‘Revolutionary Romances: Into the Cold – Alternative Artistic Trajectories into (Post-)Communist Europe’ both at the Albertinum, Dresden, 2022; and the project ‘Art in Networks: The GDR and its Global Relations (1949–1990)’ at the TU Dresden.

^[5]    Natalia Grincheva, ‘The Past and Future of Cultural Diplomacy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol 30, no 2, 2024, pp 172–191, p 172

^[6]    See György Péteri, ‘Nylon Curtain: Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe’, Slavonica, vol 10, no 2, 2004, pp 113–123

^[7]    See James Mark and Paul Betts, ‘Introduction’, in Mark and Betts, eds, Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonization, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022, p 4

^[8]    From the mission statement on the homepage of the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje.

^[9]    I thank Anna-Marie Kroupová for this valuable supplement.

^[10]  As commented by Noit Banai in her keynote lecture ‘The (E)state of the Archive: Border Crossings, Translations, Dialogical Imaginations’, at the conference ‘Untold Narratives: Artists' Archives and Estates’, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 5 October 2024

The author would like to thank Anna-Marie Kroupová and Sarah Ware for their helpful revisions of this text.

Hamida Sivac is an art historian and fellow at the University of Vienna, currently working between Rome and Vienna on completing her PhD about ‘The Beginnings of the Feminist Critique of Language in the Visual Arts’. She has published papers on the Bauhaus artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, bread and dough as art materials, and on feminist art strategies of the critique of language.